“You need to go home. Vault-dwellers are an endangered species.” It’s not exactly the warmest of welcomes, is it? Especially when coming from Michael Emerson, whose iconic role on Lost rendered him perpetually a bit creepy.
But then, a weird warning only makes sense in this world. Right on the heels of some intriguing images, Prime Video has delivered the first trailer for its Fallout adaptation, and it looks very, very good.
The thing that makes this trailer so appealing is the way it slowly gets increasingly weird. Wasteland, skulls, yeah, yeah, we’ve all seen these things in a post-apocalyptic landscape before—though it is all new to Lucy (Ella Purnell). For us? Old news. The giant cockroach is unnerving, but still, sure, okay. I guess you need a really big magazine with which to smash it.
But then. Then, there’s a gentleman (Maximus, played by Aaron Moten) who seems to be in love with his power armor, maybe. (At least that’s what the musical cue is saying.) A nice doggie has a nice severed hand in its mouth. Walton Goggins has no nose. Another guy has no pants. I don’t even want to talk about the bear, or the moldy coffee. All of this plays out under the sweet strains of Nat King Cole’s “I Don’t Want to See Tomorrow,” which is very much A Choice, and gives it all a very pleasantly doomy vibe.
Here’s the synopsis:
Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.
Fallout was developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (Westworld); Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia) are co-showrunners and writers. The cast includes Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), Sarita Choudhury (Jessica Jones), Leslie Uggams (Deadpool), Zach Cherry (Severance), and Xelia Mendes-Jones (The Wheel of Time).
The series premieres on Prime Video on April 12, 2024.
Check out the trailer below.
