With Bethesda’s superlative Fallout 4 now out in the wild and racking up some great critical acclaim, it makes sense that most of you will be wanting to get your mitts on the game and stuff it into your PS4 consoles as soon as you can.
Of course, being a strong GOTY candidate, you lot will no doubt be intent on ploughing hundreds upon hundreds of hours into it, alienating friends, relatives and loved ones along the way and leaving your own social wasteland behind in your wake.
However for those intervals of inactivity where you aren’t trying to rustle up some Enclave Advanced Power Armor or doing a spot of DIY around your new wasteland home, what better way to spend your Fallout 4 downtime than to spend it on the couch watching a bunch of movies with a post-apocalyptic or wasteland slant?
So with that in mind, here are five films that we feel go well with Bethesda’s latest post-apocalyptic adventure.
A Boy and His Dog
One of the greatest things about Bethesda’s fourth core entry in the Fallout franchise is Dogmeat – the trusty canine that can befriend and aid your intrepid Vault Hunter from quite early on in the game. Released in 1975 and adapted from a 1969 cycle of narratives, A Boy and His Dog stars an extremely young Don Johnson (Miami Vice, Django Unchained) as Vic, an 18-year old lad scavenging and growing up on the wasteland of what used to be the southwestern United States.
Accompanied by his trusty dog ‘Blood’, a canine that just so happens to be well-read, telepathic and more than a touch misanthropic, the two set off into the wasteland to scavenge for food, shelter, ladies (don’t ask) and alcohol in a romp that feels like the sort of movie Terry Gilliam would make if someone asked him to film one based on Fallout. Equal parts grim and darkly funny, A Boy and His Dog is certainly the most offbeat offering of the five movies discussed here.
Now while Dogmeat in Fallout 4 doesn’t have any telepathic powers (that we know of), it’s fair to say that the underlying current of man’s best friend proving to be an erstwhile companion in the face of overwhelming horror and desolation, is something held in common by both Fallout 4 and A Boy and His Dog.
Children of Men
While the Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity) directed Children of Men doesn’t show a wasteland landscape stuffed with rampaging mutant cannibals, the 2006 film does instead manage to show a very different and poignant sort of apocalypse.
Set in 2027, the human race has been blighted by an infertility epidemic with the last human birth occurring some eighteen years prior. Rammed to the gills with quality acting talent such as Clive Owen (The Knick, Sin City), Julianne Moore (Still Alice, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay) and Michael Caine (too many movies to name), Children of Men weaves a tale of extreme desperation tinged by hope, as the remaining humans battle over the last pregnant woman on the planet.
While Children of Men is perhaps the least conventional of the apocalypse movies here, It’s horrendously well acted, wonderfully shot and like many of the individuals depicted within Fallout 4 itself, the film shows the lengths that humanity will go to in order to ensure its future.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Arguably one of the greatest action movies of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road reunites original Mad Max director George Miller with the material that so well defined his cinematic legacy. A white knuckle thrill ride, Mad Max: Fury Road is an exercise of bombastic excess as the film tears through its excellently realised wasteland setting with vicious vehicle chases, bone-crunching fight scenes and some of the best stunt work seen to date.
Aside from its on-the-nose approach to action cinema, Mad Max: Fury Road also does a bang up job of showcasing the sweep and spectacle of the wasteland, as sandy vistas as far as the eye can see occasionally give way to ramshackle structures and the diseased, radiation-blighted denizens that exist within.
As it turns out, there was a Mad Max game which was released a couple of months back on PS4 that wasn’t too bad either, in case you were wondering.
The Book of Eli
Starring Denzel Washington (Training Day) as a blind travelling pilgrim with some absolutely obscene hand-to-hand combat skills, The Book of Eli might not be the deepest take on the wasteland movie ever but it does showcase some absolutely belting landscapes and of course, ultraviolence by the truckload.
An especially well-done action scene is where Eli shacks up with a couple of long-married old folks turned cannibal as they attempt to hold off a rather nasty home invasion from a bunch of fully-armed wasteland thugs. It’s a brilliantly well shot scene that looks like it was yanked out of a Fallout plotline and much like the rest of the movie, it ends up being hugely entertaining.
Oh and a special mention must be given to Gary Oldman’s (The Dark Knight) neurotic town leader who despite being illiterate, believes that the last remaining copy of the bible can give him absolute power over the rest of humanity. Here, Oldman turns in a wonderfully over-the-top performance that neatly meshes well with the rest of what is ostensibly a highly entertaining movie.
The Road
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Denzel Washington’s blind, yet terrifyingly clinical wasteland murdering machine, is Viggo Mortensen’s (Lord of the Rings) character in The Road. In John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptation of the 2006 source material of the same name, Viggo’s character is a weary survivor who is not defined as a fighter but rather as a gritty survivor, whose constant struggle to exist is underlined by the trials and tribulations that he encounters during his journey.
Anchoring his survival instincts is his young son whom he must protect and see to safety as the pair cross the devastated wasteland of North America, scavenging supplies, meeting other survivors and of course, running into gangs of violent cannibals who want to turn them into their next meal.
Arguably the slowest paced entry of the five films discussed here, The Road is also perhaps the most thoughtful; deftly providing a glimpse into how the everyman might survive the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse where nothing comes easy and attempting to care for your loved ones proves to be an almost insurmountable task. Certainly, the themes of loss, desperation and hope which permeate The Road should be familiar to all but the newest Fallout players.