Lisa Joy’s science fiction is strongest when its imagined societies feel inhabited. We recommend Fallout for its people and its carefully made wasteland, though we would welcome firmer storytelling.
Fi1m perspective
In Fallout (2024), there is something to examine even when nobody is getting anywhere. Howard Cummings’s production design gives the retrofuturist society peculiar, recognisable tastes and gives its corporate satire somewhere convincing to happen. We enjoyed the wandering more than we expected, because the surroundings kept rewarding our attention when the plot was not. It is a good introduction to Lisa Joy’s strengths: detailed imagined places, with enough going on inside them to make us curious.
Joy’s work as a director sits alongside a larger role in writing and producing. She co-created and co-ran Westworld (2016–2022) with Jonathan Nolan, directing one episode, before making her feature directorial debut with Reminiscence (2021). That techno-noir thriller’s concern with memory and the past fits her recurring interest in time and loops. It also gave her room to complicate the female characters within noir, rather than simply accept the genre’s expectations of them. On Fallout, she is an executive producer and the director of one episode; the programme’s achievements belong to a substantial shared effort.
That is worth remembering when the violence gets busy and the images remain easy to follow. Dan Stoloff and Stuart Dryburgh are among Fallout’s credited cinematographers, and their legible treatment of the setting helps us stay with the action. Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins are just as important to our recommendation, giving us people worth following through the grotesque wasteland. The care taken over the surroundings would count for less if the cast could not hold our attention within them.
Our reservation is with the wandering plot, which sometimes asks the cast and the scenery to do too much of the work. We admire Joy’s interest in building these societies, but detail alone cannot make every detour worthwhile. What we would welcome next is the same care applied to keeping a story moving. Start with Fallout, with some patience for its reluctance to get on with things.
Biography
Lisa Joy is an American screenwriter, director and producer. She graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School and practised law before entering television. Her early writing credits include episodes of the ABC series Pushing Daisies (2007–2009) and the USA Network series Burn Notice (2009–2011).
Joy co-created the HBO science-fiction series Westworld (2016–2022) with her husband Jonathan Nolan, serving as co-showrunner, writer, director and executive producer. She received multiple Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the series. In 2021 she made her feature directorial debut with Reminiscence, which she also wrote and produced.
She is an executive producer on the Prime Video series Fallout (2024–) and directed one episode. Through her production company Kilter Films, co-founded with Nolan, she has been involved in additional projects including The Peripheral.
