Why Did Fallout's Wasteland Look So Familiar to Post-Apocalypse Fans?
The Wasteland looks so good because it’s real — and yes, you already saw it in another post-apocalypse movie.
Summary:
- Prime Video ’s Fallout shot its Wasteland scenes in Namibia’s Namib Desert.
- Ghost town and the abandoned diamond mine from the show are real places.
- 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road also filmed its desert car chase in Namibia.
Prime Video’s Fallout TV show took the best pages out of other successful shows’ books: filming on location is always better than using those pesky green screens (yes, MCU, we’re looking at you). The Wasteland in the new post-apocalyptic series is stunning, and to some fans, it looked vaguely familiar — but that’s only because it should be. After all, Fallout wasn’t this filming location’s first rodeo.
Fallout Found Its Perfect Wasteland
Even if Jonathan Nolan wanted to create the most authentic Fallout experience, he would not have been allowed to explode a real nuclear bomb to recreate the Wasteland, just like his practical effects-obsessed brother Christopher wasn’t allowed to for Oppenheimer, so the Fallout creator opted for the second best thing.
To film the Wasteland, the crew and cast headed deep into Namibia’s Namib Desert, far away from any civilization. Remember that ghost town from the show? It looked so good because it was real — and the show also used “a bombed diamond mine that is now a hyenas’ den.” The Namib Desert provided a spectacular backdrop.
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According to Jonathan Nolan, during the shooting at an abandoned coastal diamond refinery, he was told that no one had ever filmed anything at that exact location… But that wasn’t true for other nearby locales, which is why you could recognize the place!
The Namib Desert Is a Movie Star
The stunning sceneries and the beautiful lifelessness of the Namib Desert made it the perfect place to shoot post-apocalypse movies, especially those related to climate change or nuclear wars. Nolan and his Fallout crew weren’t the first people with cameras to step foot there hoping to achieve that wasteland-ish feeling.
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Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron ’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road was also shot in Namibia — not entirely, of course, but the movie’s crew spent around a year there filming Mad Max’s mind-blowing desert car chase. If you’ve watched that film, you probably had that tingling feeling of encountering something familiar but not being able to pinpoint it when watching Fallout — well, here’s your answer to what it was.