Ideologically, this episode of a video game adaptation makes some provocative points. That’s probably not a sentence you’d have read until very recently, given the track record of video game adaptations.
But that’s a historical fluke, not a reflection of limitations in the source material. When I was awakened to the artistic potential of video games in the 1990s first Myst, then Quake, then Super Mario 64, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — I’ve never seen any reason a movie or TV show based on one couldn’t also be thoughtful, beautiful, powerful in its own right. Even if we’re not quite there yet, it’s only a matter of time.
At any rate, Fallout Episode 3 (“The Head”) is, indeed, an interesting political text. It starts early, in a flashback to the Ghoul’s days as horse-opera movie star Cooper Howard. On set one day, Cooper balks at executing a wounded villain in cold blood after a cool monologue. He’s told by the director that the original writer has been fired for being a Commie, that the new script reflects “the power of the individual when the chips are down, the new America,” and that “out here, it’s just you, your gun, and your personal code, bringing order to the Wild Wild West.”
That’s fascism. You get that that’s fascism, right? Persecuted Communists, patriotic übermenschen, the wide world tamed by the master race and the beauty of its weapons: plain old American fascism, ladies and germs! That’s the America that went up in smoke when the bombs dropped: a fascist state in Donna Reed dresses and Ward Cleaver cardigans. That it’s also the America one of our two major political parties is frantically scrambling to recreate…I leave it to you to decide if the filmmakers had that in mind.
I reviewed episode three of Fallout for Decider.
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