Prime Video's Fallout Took Inspiration from Alien to Perfect the Power Armor

The upcoming Fallout TV series took inspiration from Alien to bring its beefy Power Armor to life. The Fallout series has a lot of iconic imagery and objects that would be pretty impractical if we applied any sort of realism to it. Of course, it's pretty unrealistic we'd have ghouls and vaults and the ability to withstand our country being totally decimated by atom bombs, but that's besides the point. However, this has made it also very difficult to adapt Fallout as a lot of its signature elements are really hard to convey with real people and props.

The Brotherhood of Steel's Power Armor is one of the most iconic elements of the Fallout franchise and is prominently featured on the cover on almost every game in the series. With that said, it's important to do it justice. During a roundtable interview, Jonathan Nolan, writer and director of the Fallout TV series for Prime Video, noted how they were keen to use practical elements for the Power Armor. The creative spoke about how working with his brother, Christopher Nolan, helped him realize that if you can do as much in-camera as possible, it will help make the VFX you do use look better. So, for something as big and bulky as the Power Armor, they looked to Alien for inspiration. On that film, Ridley Scott built a suit around a very particular and oddly shaped performer and then committed to using that actor as the Xenomorph.

"We had used that trick before in Westworld for the drone hosts in exactly the same way and knew that it would work here," Nolan said. "So rather than trying to build one suit, we worked with Legacy [Effects] – terrific vendor, worked on some of the original Iron Man suits and has done amazing work over the years – and one particularly talented performer, Adam Shippey, to build a suit and a performer that would work kind of in concert with one another. To have that heaviness and scale without doing all CG."

As of right now, we have no idea how much the Power Armor will be featured in the Fallout TV series. Given the logistics of it all, it sounds incredibly complicated and the trailer shows that the Brotherhood of Steel will be seen primarily through the eyes of a new character named Maximus. Nolan also noted in the roundtable interview that we will get to see someone in the Power Armor utilize the jet packs take flight and somehow... they did that for real as well. 

Fallout TV Series Release Date

The upcoming Fallout TV series will be released on Prime Video on April 12th, 2024. Prime Video tends to release its shows on a weekly basis as opposed to dumping them all on day one, so we can likely expect that to happen again here. It's unknown how many episodes will be in the first season of Fallout, but shows of this scale tend to have around 10 a season.