‘Fallout’ First Look: This Is How the World Ends

When a crisis forces Lucy to venture above on a rescue mission, she finds that the planet above remains a hellscape crawling with giant insects, voracious mutant animal “abominations,” and a human population of sunbaked miscreants who make the manners, morals, and hygiene of the gunslinging Old West look like Downton Abbey. “The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” Nolan tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look.

Lucy is nice, but Lucy is naive. In the Fallout universe, the human beings fortunate enough to ride out the apocalypse in underground communities only had that option available to them because they had money. Forcing doe-eyed Lucy out into this sadistic, Darwinian remnant of civilization opens the door for Fallout to engage in some social satire as well as action and adventure. Like HBO’s hit The Last of Us, which was also adapted from a blockbuster video game, the end of the world offers a rich opportunity to comment on the real one.

“We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way,” says Nolan, who directed the first three episodes. “I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’”

As Westworld demonstrated, Nolan has a fascination with the mix of mythology and psychology that make up human nature. His characters typically believe one thing about themselves while behaving in a radically different way under pressure. He previously created the series Person of Interest, about a world in which crimes and terrorism can be predicted in advance, and cowrote such films as The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar with his filmmaker brother, Christopher Nolan. Jonathan—who goes by Jonah—is fond of plunging his fictional test subjects into situations that unsettle their deeply held beliefs.