The original post: /r/television by /u/jovanbeef on 2024-05-04 20:16:41.
Warning: Long. This will be a bit of a rant.
I’m very confused. I don’t get the praise and I doubt I’ll come around anytime soon. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t even make me angry or anything, but it’s just not good.
I’ll admit I was very skeptical before it came out. Now, I’m not some big fan of the Fallout games. I’ve played a lot of Fallout 4, used to like it, that opinion has 180-ed since. Fallout 3 wasn’t for me. I did like New Vegas, but haven’t finished it. Will do that and get to the old ones at some point. All this to say: I’m not very defensive about this IP, so it’s not like I kept eyeing like a hawk for lore inaccuracies.
When I heard the praise after the premiere, I was pretty surprised. Curiosity overtook me, so I watched it and am now more confused than ever. There were things I liked: Walton Goggins, because obviously, and Ella Purnell made an interesting protagonist. Costume design was pretty good too.
However, everything else just fell apart. The character motivations are all over the place. After a certain point, it feels like the writers just forgot about the whole chase for the head and just decided to make it some cheap macguffin that had very little to do with the story itself. Why is the BOS portrayed so incompetently? At first, they’re supposed to seem cultish, obsessed and brutal, yet every knight is shown to be a moron. Titus’ death was the stupidest plot contrivance I’ve seen in a while. The voice effect for the power armor also became very old very quickly.
The whole season is just stuffed with conveniences and plot holes. Along with that, the humor was MCU level shit and possibly worse at points which is fascinating because I’ve heard people praise the fact that it doesn’t fall into that for the most part, when there’s so much of it.
My least favorite aspect, however, was the cinematography. So much of the show is filmed with this 2.39:1 ultrawide lens that morphs the edges of almost every shot and it looks awful. I have no clue why they didn’t just go for a standard 16:9 aspect ratio because it would’ve looked so much better. The lighting, too, was just flat and the memes about it looking like an insurance commercial are very valid. I wouldn’t always advocate for this, but just a green or orange Mexico filter would’ve done a lot for the show’s visual consistency. I mean c’mon, there are just standard daylight lens filters that film students use on DSLR cameras that would’ve worked. Anything.
There are many more things I could criticize, but this post is already long enough. I just want to know if Disney shows have brought our standards so low that this gets a pass. It’s not as bad as a lot of those, but it really isn’t much better.
Thank you for reading.
EDIT: I think there was a misunderstanding in some comments here. I’m not trying to hate on the people who like the show or even the show itself. If you enjoyed it, hell yea brother good for you. The reason I posted this was to a) get some more perspective because I’m open to changing my mind and b) to see if I’m not the only person who felt this way. Apologies if I came off a little harsh, not my intention.