David Nadas

If you’ve followed my posts over the years, you know my appetite for U.S. produced films—especially in the Sci-Fi genre–– has all but waned; it’s been a steady diet of reheated sequels, overcooked plots, and character development so thin you can slip them under a door. For that, I can get the same emotional dullness from the evening news.

To find something with substance, originality, and a flavor that lingers, you need to look elsewhere and you can find it with Off-Continent productions, which are killing it.

Hollywood is in crisis and has fallen far behind.

But Fallout is a breath of fresh, irradiated air. It’s a wild fusion of post-apocalyptic science fiction, western grit, mid-century nostalgia, and the stunning aesthetic similar of Simon Stålenhag. Think WOOL (Silo Series), by Hugh Howey, meets Asteroid City, with a dose of retro-futurism.

Adapted from the popular video game, the series opens in 1950s California at a picture-perfect birthday party—mid-century modern vibes and all—when suddenly, nuclear war breaks out. Fast forward to a devastated Earth where subsurface elites (pre-apocalypse California survivors) live in interconnected underground vaults. The plot kicks off with a trade between Vault 32 and Vault 33: one fertile man for a supply of crops, due to a blight that has wiped out Vault 32’s harvest. Naturally, everything spirals from there.

No spoilers, but the heroine from Vault 33 heads to the surface in search of her father—and that’s when things really get interesting.

While the characters span a colorful range, it’s the set design that steals the show for me. As a longtime fan of Simon Stålenhag, I found myself constantly pausing to take in the detail—each frame like a page from one of his eerie, beautiful picture novellas I love flipping through in the comfort of my living room, listening to Brian Eno.