The game-ification of violence [an old(er) man complaint]

There was very little chance that I would like any series based on a video game that begins with a warning of "strong blood and violence", but I gave the first episode of Fallout a go.   

I found it very un-engaging and dull:  as I said to my son (who didn't exactly give it a rave review, either) nothing about it feels real.   By which I meant:  "of course a story based on a post apocalyptic video game is not going to 'feel real' in a literal sense, but in the shallow way the characters feel drawn, the emphasis on visual effects, and the over-the-top violence and blood, its video game origins are far too obvious."

And the frequent ironic use of 50's music just played like a tiresome gimmick we've seen before that was trying too hard.   Hey, I've found a review that complains about it feeling shallow, too:

Startlingly glib, one-note, and yet self-assured in its vacant design, the series reveals its shallow hand very early. “Fallout” endlessly reprises the wholesome quaintness vs. the grotesque or freakishly ruthlessness mode of apposition and fails to do anything remotely interesting with it, reinforcing what swiftly becomes a long, tiresome pattern and slog....

...the game’s milieu was one of atompunk retrofuturism, juxtaposing 1950s post-war idealism—the naïve promise of space-age technology and nuclear war anxieties— against the framework of a ravaged and dangerous apocalypse. While “Fallout,” the series, presents the concepts and throwback aesthetics faithfully, that’s unfortunately all it’s got in its trivial toolkit. What it does with it beyond that devoted presentation is just banal, insipidly trying to make a big meal out of a thin idea that is barely sustainable nourishment. 

Finally, let me slip into my oft-repeated complaint:  the "game-ification" of, and desensitisation to, ultra violence that both modern movies and video games have brought is shameful and a bad thing for society.   (And my follow up for even-handedness - I know, past generations might have thought nothing of a day out to view a real execution, or of kids watching a cow or pig being slaughtered.   I don't think watching human executions is ever a sign of a good society, either.)    But the way we have gone from at least some adults thinking that young kids playing with toy guns was an unfortunate endorsement of violence, to now barely a parent being concerned that their 10 year old is splattering characters and watching them explode in a gallon of blood is, well, really something. 

Anyway, I think it likely that the really enthusiastic reviews will mainly come from people under 40 who have played the game.  As Rolling Stone wrote:

...like the soundtrack, there are pieces of so many other movies and shows — Apple’s Silo beat it to market by a year with its own (albeit more dramatic) portrait of post-apocalyptic underground life — that much of it plays as ripping off other material, even though the games have been around in various forms since the late Nineties. 

...even if Last of Us didn’t exist, Fallout would still feel like an arch and overly-familiar series, with enough interesting performances and background details to keep it from being a waste of time, but not enough spark of its own to be fully satisfying. Though maybe fans of the game will feel differently.