What is left to fight over once a pandemic has emptied the world? Armageddon Tales, a 2021 action and science-fiction feature credited to Kaleb Lechowski, Alexander Lappöhn and Paul Plett, answers with several small stories rather than one big one.
What is Armageddon Tales about?
The outbreak is over and most of humanity is gone. Across the ruined landscapes that remain, the film follows three separate threads. Two men travel together despite wanting very different things from the road ahead, and their uneasy partnership is tested by every settlement and stranger they meet. Elsewhere, two women leave the relative safety of a survival colony and have to work out whether the rules that kept the colony alive still apply outside its walls. A third strand pairs a young girl with a grown man, an alliance built on need rather than trust. None of these groups begins with a plan that survives contact with the world; each is forced to decide, again and again, who to rely on and what to give up. Armageddon Tales moves between them without insisting that they meet, letting the same empty world press on each pairing in its own way.
About the cast
Jeremy Dash, Sarah Groleau, Erin Hyndman and Fay Kelman head a small cast, which suits a film built from two-handers. With only a few performers carrying each strand, the exchanges between travelling companions do most of the storytelling, and the actors are asked to convey exhaustion, suspicion and cautious dependence with little dialogue to lean on.
Context & significance
Three directors share the credit on Armageddon Tales, which explains its segmented shape: rather than a single sweeping post-apocalyptic epic, it plays as a set of linked survival vignettes united by setting and tone. A co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, it runs a little over an hour and a half and arrived in 2021, when stories about the aftermath of a global virus carried an obvious extra charge. Its lineage is the low-budget end of the genre, where deserted roads, improvised weapons and the ethics of sharing scarce supplies matter more than special effects. Viewers who like their science fiction stripped back to people, terrain and hard choices will find that mode here.
Watching Armageddon Tales on Ktime
Armageddon Tales is available on K-Time once you log in with a free account. The film is presented in its original English audio. K-Time's menus, search and watchlist work in Persian, so Farsi-speaking viewers can navigate the catalogue comfortably before pressing play.