Amazon Prime: Series “Fallout”: End of the world again

And the world is ending again. The cultural sector is playing out the end of our civilization at ever shorter intervals. The post-apocalypse is increasingly becoming a dominant narrative of our time. It is difficult to determine whether this is just a desire for a break with the status quo, as philosopher Guillaume Paoli suspects, behind deep-seated fears that need to be dealt with, or whether the fictional doomsdays are just allegories of a present that is becoming increasingly threatening and authoritarian accept.

The latest product in this trendy science fiction subgenre is the Amazon Prime series “Fallout,” the cinematic adaptation of a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter game with complex world-building that has been available in new versions since the 90s. As their complexity increases, video games are increasingly becoming the basis for film adaptations; Recently, the broadcaster HBO, which specializes in quality television, turned the zombie doomsday game “The Last of Us” into a critically acclaimed nine-part series, which will soon be continued with a second season.

“Fallout” is a flagship product for the streaming service Amazon Prime, advertised online with countless film snippets, and in terms of production costs, it makes it into the top ten of the most expensive series of all time at just under $20 million per episode, where it is roughly on a par with that “Game of Thrones” successor “House of the Dragon”.

Set in a post-atomic world several centuries in the future that is largely destroyed and radioactively contaminated, the series is about a technological artifact sought by various factions that enables cold fusion and offers limitless energy resources in a world marked by scarcity. At the center of the story is Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), who lives with her family in an underground bunker whose population has had no contact with the outside world for 200 years until they are ambushed by a group of survivors from the surface. Lucy’s father, Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan), is kidnapped and his daughter leaves the bunker to search for him, having one bizarre adventure after another on the surface.

The married couple Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who were also responsible for the science fiction series “Westworld” (HBO) and “Periphery” (Amazon), set this story as a macabre and satirical splatter epic with bright images and an action-packed plot to – just like the computer game suggests. The world of “Fallout” is largely aesthetically reminiscent of the vintage culture of the 50s, including the underlying Cold War logic that the game ironically distorts, including the anti-communist “Red Scare” and of flat American patriotism come from the staid 1950s of the McCarthy era.

The underground bunkers caricature the petty-bourgeois heteronormative morals of the time and contrast them with the anarchic and violent culture in the Wasteland on the contaminated surface of the earth. There are three-meter-tall monsters, giant insects, undead cowboys, cannibalistic hippies and oversized knight-like robots that belong to an authoritarian brotherhood. This world à la “Mad Max” with the punching and stabbing in the Hobbesian sense is hardly surprising and, in its ironic, violent depiction, is sometimes downright unsavory.

Even before the start, the streaming service Amazon Prime signaled that there would be a second season. The success of this blockbuster is almost inevitable. The end-of-the-world narrative is also currently booming in literature. While “Fallout” is an ironic spectacle aimed at a mass audience – and will reach it – a literary gem like the recently published novel “The Diver’s Game” by Jesse Ball (Luftschacht-Verlag), which goes in a frightening way and told far less spectacularly about an authoritarian post-nuclear social system, completely lost in the cultural scene.

This novel, in which, as in “Fallout,” people are mutilated and a racist class system is established, develops exactly the narrative and political force that the Amazon series lacks. Because there is a lot of political potential and critical ability in the currently popular post-apocalypse stories, if they don’t degenerate into flat spectacle.

Available on Amazon Prime.