Jonathan Nolan’s life is already complicated enough by the fact that he was born Christopher Nolan’s younger brother. As if that wasn’t enough, Nolan (Jonathan) does nothing to make this life easier. Indeed: he seems to work with all his strength, at every moment, with every decision to make it even more complicated. He spent his youth writing film screenplays – Memento, The Prestige, The dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar – who would have made his brother’s fame, money and success: almost no one remembers who wrote a film, everyone knows who shot it, after all. Having reached adulthood, Nolan (Jonathan) has decided to free himself from a brother who has now become a burden and to finally start his own business. Even in this case, he decides to do things so complicated that self-harming tendencies are suspected.
Create one of the best series of the 2000s, Person of Interest, which anticipates all the talk about surveillance capitalism and the omnipotence of new technologies that would begin a decade later. Place this series on CBS, an old-fashioned broadcast network, the closest thing to Rai1 if there was anything close to Rai1 in the United States: Nolan tries to explain the future to the white, conservative lower middle class, no one understands what he’s talking about, he must be satisfied with having created a cult series and nothing more. After Person of Interest he comes Westworld, and this time it seems that Nolan has learned the recipe for success: the series is the right one, the historical moment too, the chosen channel (Hbo) too. But this time too, that tendency towards complication gets in the way: after the first, splendid season, Westworld becomes so bizarre that even HBO – known for its liberal, very liberal policies – is forced to intervene to bring order (after all, we are only now starting to understand the discussion on AI that Nolan had already started ten years ago, before Sora, ChatGPT, everything). The series is cancelled, and Nolan still assures us that he will find a way to tell the ending he wanted and not the one HBO wanted: «I’m a completionist. It took me eight years and I had to change the director to finish Interstellar. I like to finish the things I start”, she said in a recent interview withHollywoodReporters. From this answer we also understand what and how the relationship with Christopher is: Interstellar he finished it, Jonathan, at the cost of involving the other, Christopher.
And we finally arrive at Fallout, the new TV series by Jonathan Nolan, available from April 11th in streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Those who know the Nolan brothers say that Fallout is Jonathan’s response toOppenheimer by Christopher: the film tells the beginning of the American atomic epic, the series one of its possible epilogues. Certain, Oppenheimer It was True Story while Fallout it is speculative fiction. But Jonathan Nolan’s bet – and perhaps also the umpteenth confirmation of those self-defeating tendencies – is precisely this: a post-atomic future, a wasteland in which humanity survives holed up in immense underground bunkers (the Vaults), is Really speculative fiction Today? Nolan said that the idea for the series came to him in a moment of burnout: he had decided to stay at home for a while and do nothing other than read books and comics, watch films and TV series and play games. video games. That’s how he found out Fallout 3, the third chapter of the video game saga, the first produced by Bethesda, sequel/reboot of a classic that changed and elevated the American (video) role-playing game in the nineties. «One of the most influential games of all time», wrote Russ Pitts on Polygonin a piece that told how Fallout miraculously exists: no one at the time wanted to produce such a “depressing” game, summed up in the maxim invented by creator Tim Cain “Life is cheap and violence is all there is”.
Playing it for the first time, Nolan understood why gamers have continued to return to the world of Fallout: «It’s a unique game. It’s political. He has an absurd point of view and is incredibly violent.” Nolan immediately understood the immense narrative potential that Fallout still retains within itself. An intricate, mysterious and fascinating mythology like few others in the history of video games. A very peculiar design, a unique type of retrofuturism that mixes the decor of Eisenhower’s America, the desert of Mad MaxCold War propaganda posters, the technology of the future as imagined in the pulp magazines of the 1950s, and the humor of the golden years of Mad Magazine. A surreal techno-optimism that Nolan says he “transmitted” to the series with the help of his friend Elon Musk. A story that can be any story: Fallout 3 it is an open world, which in this case means a game with a very vague plot scattered across places, events and characters that the player/protagonist can decide whether to visit, experience or meet. Reduced to the essence, that of Fallout 3 – but in reality of the entire videogame saga – it is the American story par excellence: that of the solitary hero (in this case a little girl who abandons the totalitarian security of the Vault in which she was born to go on an adventure in a shattered America) which stands out on the horizon of a hostile world, is the epic of the West brought up to date by means of an atomic apocalypse which has made the once unexplored lands desolate.
All this convinced Jonathan Nolan to transform the video game into a TV series. All this but not only this. In addition to having a tendency towards complication, Nolan also has exceptional cultural intuition. He said that the success of The Last of Us – Speaking of which: Fallout is proof that video games really will be the new superhero comics for Hollywood – it made him realize that humanity right now is gripped by an insatiable and uncontrollable appetite for destruction. Regardless of the nature of the catastrophe (zombie, atomic, climatic, epidemic, technological) they tell, post-apocalyptic stories are today something moreover what simple stories. They are leaps forward, towards devastated futures that someone, somewhere, is deciding whether to realize or avoid. On the other hand, if war in Europe is really possible, how impossible could it still be, and for how much longer could the annihilation of all humanity be? The clues are there, scattered around us like an invisible electric current that nevertheless makes the hairs on our arms stand on end. Billionaires (Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, just to name two more billionaires than almost everyone else) are spending absurd sums to build very luxurious bunkers on their personal Caribbean islands. Every other day there is a Medvedev or an Eliyahu who says that the use of the “atomic option” in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip at the moment cannot be ruled out. Hollywood, which from 1945 to 2023 had produced only three films about the atomic bomb, will have already produced at least two by 2030. The success of Oppenheimer it is already becoming a genre, fashion: without it Legendary Pictures would never have acquired the rights to transpose the essay Nuclear War: A scenario by Annie Jacobsen and would never have decided to entrust the film to none other than Denis Villeneuve. And, even if Jonathan Nolan will never admit it because relationships between brothers are always complicated, without the success of Oppenheimer not even Amazon Studios would have ever decided to produce Fallout.
Nolan is convinced that his new series can be a bearer of the spirit of the time, or at worst a precursor of the same as they have already been Person of Interest And Westworld. Obviously, those who love him are worried about Nolan because they fear seeing in the future what they have already seen in the past: aren’t you exaggerating?, friends, colleagues and family ask him (except his brother, who certainly cannot afford to give lessons to anyone). Aren’t you making everything too difficult, too complicated?, they ask him. Is it possible that you haven’t learned any lessons from the previous ones?, they ask themselves. And Nolan says that he agrees with them, that «we live in a historical moment in which things are so bad all over the world that making a series that puts its finger on this very wound would be madness». And that’s exactly why he decided to do it Fallout.
