Cordell Gascoigne Reviews Amazon's Fallout

The increasing fashionability of video game adaptations has been a factor not just on the big screen, where last year we got The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy's, but on the small screen as well, where HBO's The Last of Us followed in the footsteps of The Walking Dead by similarly winning the kind of unhinged critical praise for a prestige TV show that The Sopranos made so customary.

Now Amazon has Fallout, which has also been praised in a comparable fashion. Is it relevant to such a reception that Fallout, like The Last of Us, is a post-apocalyptic drama wallowing in a grimdark, misanthropic view of the world? I would imagine so, the more for having read a less conventional take on the material from Cordell Gascoigne that, the more persuasive in as Gascoigne is less impressed with those things that make critics lose their critical faculties. He presents Fallout as a cliché-packed yet inconsistent narrative in the end carried by "gratuitous violence and shock value"--failings that seem to him characteristic not only of this series, but the "romancing the nuclear post-apocalypse" genre Paul Brians was already criticizing decades ago, and which stands in stark counterpoint to what he thought a far more substantial treatment of the dangers of the nuclear age in Oppenheimer. Indeed, Gascoigne does not overlook the fact that Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan directed three episodes of the show--regarding which someone sympathetic to Gascoigne's outlook may say that where Christopher Nolan rose above the level of his past works with Oppenheimer, Jonathan proved all too conventional in telling his much more pop-oriented tale in Fallout.