Marigold

Get this guy a shrink.

Weird, wicked and irradiated, i.e. the more Ghoul, the more fun. I considered the ridiculous Westworld to be collective cognitive dissonance and thus I didn’t expect much from Fallout. But hey, it not only doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s also pleasantly illuminating. The funny blend of creepy western, futuretro slapstick and narrative sci-fi has a cheerfully fitting tone grounded in the main aesthetic pillars of the games and creating its own origin story. Yeah, the first half is significantly better and the last three episodes, which suddenly start to form epic arcs, are a bit prone to throwing out clichés. But nothing fatal. The Ghoul and Norm are great characters, Lucy has potential and Maximus isn’t annoying. I’m very satisfied and I look forward to the next trek through the wasteland.

A violent nightmare that I dreamed for some unknown reason. Kind of like Children of Men from Wish. Garland somewhat mechanically adorns his shady road movie with random images of a broken America. A number of them are impressive, with powerful visuals and staging (mainly the scene with Jesse Plemons). The film manages to induce anxiety to the point of nausea from a cruel world that is not so far from The Walking Dead in its absence of morality and prevalence of brutality. But…the whole thing seems terribly gratuitous; for all of the questions that the film wants to raise, Garland’s work just shrugs its shoulders and wagers on another spectacular composition. The characters are flat and the ethics and psychology of the war reporters come across as very superficial research. There is little in the way of Nietzschean gazing into the abyss in this film, which paradoxically comes across as terribly thesis-based and illustrative, but it isn’t at all clear what its thesis is or what it actually illustrates. An impressive exercise in unclearly straddling the line between a skilfully made spectacle and a not so skilfully rendered metaphor of a divided country. It’s actually a reiteration of my problem with Garland, a maker of spectacular movies that are dull at their core.