On October 28 the world will plunge into an irradiated nightmare, littered with the wreckage of civilization, overrun by savage super mutants. Or, my world will be, anyway. Next month is when the hotly anticipated new video game Fallout 3 will be released. It’s been over a decade since the first Fallout, a now classic post-apocalyptic role-playing game. How has the franchise maintained such a devoted fan base? Simple: great story, great characters, great setting, and killer cinematics.
The games have always been deeply indebted to post-apocalyptic cinema. The opening sequence of the first game is almost identical to the one in The Road Warrior, and the similarities don’t end there. As the Max Payne movie is (hopefully) about to prove, there is an elegant solution to the problem of videogame movies sucking: make movies about games that are already steeped in cinematic influence. In other words, a Fallout movie would kick serious ass. It would have a similar feel to classics like The Road Warrior, but Fallout has its own brand of dark humor and retro-futurism.
For the purpose of assembling a dream cast for such a film, I’m going to stick to characters from the first game, where it all began. The game follows The Vault Dweller, a young person raised in the safety of a large underground vault. The vault community intended on riding out the nuclear storm for 200 years, but their water purification chip broke, so our hero must go and seek another.
The Vault Dweller
The badass wanderer of the wastes could be almost anyone, as Fallout gave the player the option of creating an entirely original protagonist. The game also provided three pre-made heroes, any of which could translate well to the screen.
Albert – Leonardo DiCaprio
The option to play Albert lets the player capitalize on charisma, while still doing a fair amount of damage with small arms and unarmed combat. Albert’s strength is talking his way out of tough situations, but some situations require action when words fail. DiCaprio has a great way of wearing frustration on his face, which is perfect, as I imagine that killing ghouls while fighting an addiction to radiation-resisting drugs would be quite frustrating.
Max Stone – Ron Perlman
Max Stone is set up in the game to be a big dumb bruiser, but Perlman could give the character depth beyond that stereotype. This choice is obviously informed by Perlman’s work in Sin City and the Hellyboy movies. Also, Perlman had to be on the list somewhere, given his involvement in the games. He provided the voice-over narration for the openings of Fallout 1 and 2, and provided character voices.
Natalia – Carrie-Anne Moss
While we can all agree that the Marix trilogy went downhill, that shouldn’t ruin things for Ms. Moss. She has a lot of potential as an action star, and the role of Natalie, a thief/assassin daughter of KGB spies would serve her nicely.
The other Vault Dweller option: use all three as a team! It would break from the lone-wanderer feel, but it would be pretty cool.
Other Characters
In the spirit of all great role-playing games, Fallout let the player wander around at his or her own pace, exploring, doing quests, making friends and making enemies. It wouldn’t make sense to include all the characters in the film, but here are some essentials:
The Overseer – Brian Cox
The Overseer is the leader of Vault 13, the hero’s home up until this point. He sends the Vault Dweller on a mission to save the vault by finding a replacement water purification chip before it’s too late. The Overseer starts out as a kindly father figure, offering advice and encouragement. But in the final scene of the game, he betrays the Vault Dweller in a way that’s so maddening, the game designers actually included a rare alternate ending in which the Vault Dweller blows the Overseer’s head off. Cox is really good at being both fatherly and a total dick, example: The Bourne Supremacy.
Harold – Harry Dean Stanton
Whole regions of the scarred world of Fallout are populated by ghouls, most of them mindless flesh-eaters. The Vault Dweller encounters one ghoul who’s different, who provides him with some key information. Harold was once a vault dweller like our hero, but was infected by a virus that both killed him and kept his consciousness alive in his animated corpse. That pretty much explains the choice to cast Harry Dean Stanton.
Morpheus – Michael Palin
Morpheus is the leader of The Children of the Cathedral, a sick cult that worships The Master (see below). Michael Palin is the natural choice, because he seems like a nice and funny guy whose religion you’d join, until you find out that he’s completely nuts. He pulls off this double role in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian masterpiece, Brazil. Also, there are only two people that could pull off that mustache, Michael Palin and Salvador Dali, and Dali is dead.
General Maxson - Max von Sydow
General Maxson is the leader of the Brotherhood of Steel, a league of soldiers with incredibly high-tech weapons and armor. With luck and a fair bit of skill, the Vault Dweller joins their ranks and gears up for the final confrontation. Max von Sydow is one of those actors who can bring the clout he carried in The Seventh Seal to a movie like Judge Dredd. Perfect.
The Master – James Earl Jones and Angelia Jolie
The Master is a pulsating mass of human flesh and machinery with the ability to capture and incorporate intruders into its body. It speaks with multiple voices, representing the unlucky souls who are now a part of its writhing conglomeration of body parts. The Master would have to be CG of course, but what better voices than Jones and Jolie for that perfect mix of ominous and seductive?
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