Chernobyl (2019) - Review

Director: Johan Renck | Written & Created by Craig Mazin | 5 Episodes

(Possible spoilers and graphic details below)

If you made it to the end of that trailer, the series is no more confusing but much more graphic - you should have no problem taking in the show. (© HBO | 2019)

I realise as I start this that some of you might be thinking this review is a bit late to the party - with HBO/Sky Atlantic's Chernobyl hitting screens between May and June of 2019, there must be other, more recent series I could take the time to review. But I think, having binged the entire series twice over the course of a single day, now is the perfect time, and I'll get onto why later on.

Chernobyl tells, in five expertly crafted episodes, the story of the immediate prelude to and the turbulent aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear meltdown, an event, which to me, was just something that existed on rushed TV documentaries and the setting of the finale of a Top Gear episode (back when that was a decent show). Pripyat (the nearby town that housed the plant workers, their families and more), is somewhere I have always wanted to visit, as strange as that sounds (call it dark tourism, it can be done legally...), if for no other reason than to understand what happened because the disaster is something I never really understood, both on a human or technical level. But having seen the series, having seen the story of people played out in often graphic detail, I realise that the disaster isn't just a storytelling device or a subject for the aforementioned documentary; it was a human disaster that still lives with us today. Featuring an ensemble cast including Jared Harris, Stellan Skasgård, Emily Watson, Paul Ritter, Jessie Buckley and more, the series explores the people of the disaster and the technical reasoning behind it, weaving the two together in ways that not only make the science accessible, but grounds it in a way that you can understand. Hildur Guðnadóttir provides a chilling score, composed of sounds from a real power plant, such that the music and diegetic sounds blend together, producing a fuzzy soundscape that never rests.

With an almost complete lack of A-list actors, the cast dissolves into their roles with a metamorphological precision; such that you actually believe that these people were at the scene of the disaster. In the few scenes she is in, Jessie Buckley as Lyudmilla Ignatenko does a triumphant job of capturing the chaos as an outsider; she is not a scientist, nor a technician. She never tries (on screen) to try to understand what has happened; tangentially related to the action through her firefighter husband, she almost shuns the disaster in order to tend to her deteriorating husband when the nurses struggle to cope with an overflowing hospital. On the other side of the coin, Emily Watson portrays nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk, a composite character encompassing the many scientists who investigated the accident. She plays her no-nonsense and at at most times vital role with a quiet ease; where her on-screen peers falter or appear flustered, she remains pensive, composed; the calm in the storm. The characters who really shine, however, are the minor ones; they may only have a dozen lines each, but characters like Vasily Ignatenko (Adam Nagaitis), Aleksandr Akimov (Sam Troughton), Leonid Toptunov (Robert Emms) amongst many others play the heroic parts; whether they're clambering to the roof to quell the flames from the exposed reactor, or wading through radioactive water to prevent a meltdown, theirs is the true story of Chernobyl; the complex puzzle is made up of some pretty big pieces, but they only fit because of the small links these characters form, and they are played at times with wordless expressions of confusion and panic; there is no grandeur to their performances, they are simply characters armed with little information doing the best they can to hold the plant together - theirs are the most believable and harrowing performances precisely because you know exactly how their stories end.

But Sam... I hear you say, none of the cast sound remotely Soviet, where are the Russian accents?

I anticipated your question. It's true, none of the characters speak with Russian accents. Not even Gorbachev, played by David Dencik. In fact, the only Russian you'll see or hear is either written down or played through speakers or on the television. There's an eclectic mix of Cockney, RP English, and even some unashamed Yorkshire from Ralph Ineson. This isn't a problem; in fact, it's hardly noticeable, and it works for two reasons. The first is Star Wars. Most of the characters in Star Wars speak English, and use fictional language for written words; any reason for that to work can be applied to this show. Go on, try it. The second reason is that anyone who isn't Russian but who's doing a Russian accent sounds ridiculous. Think Cate Blanchett in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Somehow, nobody can master a Russian accent without sounding like a cartoon. On a similar note, not once is 'nuclear' mispronounced as 'nucular' (your move, Indy). One of the stars on my rating was awarded based on that alone...

Another place the series excels in is its ability to explain the cause and reasons behind the disaster and the allegiances that form in the ensuing fallout in ways you can understand; complicated explanations are trimmed down into easily digestible nougats of information; with the help of visuals combined with scarce exposition, the show gives you dots that are never difficult to connect. Thanks to the series, a disaster that seemed to me as complex in its making as the construction of black holes is now something I understand and that I could explain (in very basic terms...) to someone else. The final episode demands attention perhaps more than others however, simply because everything ties together during a gripping trial that acts as both a cathartic release and at the same time a final twist of the knife.

Oftentimes, the story is propelled by harrowing, gut-punching images; the resigned face of an irradiated technician as he is berated by the clueless superiors that sent him to look into an exposed reactor core; families watching the distant plant fire as their children play in the radioactive dust that falls like snow in the dark; a father pleading for his child to be taken away from him to safety as his entire body flakes and peels; a bird falling from the sky, dead, amongst a crowd of school children; a cement mixer cresting a hill during an otherwise normal funeral to pour concrete on top of the lead-coffins of irradiated victims as their families watch on. It's powerful, heart-wrenching stuff.

It could be argued that at times the series goes too far with the depictions of radiation burns and acute radiation syndrome - but in the context of the story, perhaps it does not go far enough.

I should say, I generally have a strong stomach - things that others may turn away from or find deeply emotionally unsettling I tend to have little to no reaction to; that being said, the sight of a pregnant wife tending to her husband whose skin has all but rotted away, whose lips have turned as black as tar and who can only be described as a living blister, affected me in a way that nothing much has in the past. Maybe because I've only really seen things like that in horror or science fiction films where such things exist only to shock and frighten. The difference here is knowing that people actually suffered like that; this is more of an education. This was real.

It could be argued that at times the series goes too far with the graphic depictions of the effects of radiation burns and acute radiation syndrome in places - but in the context of the story, perhaps it does not go far enough. For some, however, a lengthy interlude towards the end of the series featuring a barely-adult Pavel Gremov (Barry Keoghan) who has been conscripted to shoot the contaminated pets of Pripyat may take more of an emotional toll and is one of the few parts of the series that risks straying into gratuitous unpleasantness.

The show is not without its light-hearted moments, which is surprising, given the subject matter. Jared Harris' Valery Legasov and Stellan Skasgård's Boris Shcherbina provide much of the humour; one a respected scientist and the other a ministerial chairman, the pair prove to be brilliant foil for one another. Serious for the most part, their exasperated exchanges occasionally end in comedy;

After a particularly tense meeting with an irate mine chief:

VL: Are they all like that?

BS: They're all like that.

After Valery pisses off the KGB first deputy chairman (a man you don't piss off):

BS: That went surprisingly well. You came off as a naïve idiot. And naïve idiots are not a threat.

...and an entire sequence of the pair staring in disbelief at the aforementioned miners who have unexpectedly stripped naked to counter extreme heat beneath the failing power plant. In ways, you don't feel guilty for laughing at these moments; the brief respite from the otherwise nihilistic tone is welcome and works to humanise the characters further; characters who are stern, stubborn and panicked all of the time do not exist in real life. A touch of humour never hurt anyone.

Where the series does go too far, however, is in the treatment of the figures history has deemed responsible for the disaster - Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief engineer at the power plant, Nikolai Fomin, chief engineer and Viktor Bryukhanov, the manager of the plant (Paul Ritter, Adrian Rawlins and Con O'Neill, respectively). The trio are painted as the main villains of the show - certainly, every good series must have a villain or two; indeed history has declared the trio as being deserving of their judgement, and perhaps the creators believe this is justification for outright villifying them; but the series takes their sins and amplifies them almost to the point of cartoon villainy (a hospitalised Anatoly tells another character that "Unless you happen to have a butter and caviar sandwich on you, you can get the fuck out of my room". Subtle) - whilst there is some truth to the portrayal of the three, their playing to the trope of snivelling management types that exist only to serve their Soviet bureaucratic higher-ups is taken to the extreme, and stands out amongst a series that otherwise seems to capture the quiet heroism of the minor players with such nuance that it was as if the filmmakers were there at the time. It is perhaps the only let-down in an otherwise impeccable production. Of course, much has been said about other historical inaccuracies; compressing events, amalgamating characters and outright invention. Indeed, the show should not be taken as a 100% true account; perhaps this is less offensive to us in the west because the series plays into our stereotypical view of what the Soviet higher-ups were - but for some Russians, who may still take pride in their Soviet history, it all to easily touches anti-Russia propaganda in places.

So what, after all of this, can Chernobyl tell us about life today? Well, to truly understand, you'll need to watch it, but in short, it goes a long way to prove that the paradigm of leadership types sitting at the top of the tree, sawing at the trunk before throwing the evidence into the hands of their subordinates as they fall to their inevitable, utterly avoidable doom, has not changed a bit. Safety measures were ignored, decision-making fell to a supposedly expert few only for them to be proven wrong in spectacular fashion. The Soviets spread misinformation to conceal or downplay the disaster, ignoring the evidence of their scientists or covering up when they realise they're too late to act. There will be deaths, one character says as a throwaway addition to a lengthy statement.

Sound familiar?

In a few minutes, it'll all be over says another, mere minutes before disaster. Chernobyl could be a story of our time; though we might not identify with the disaster, the central issue it raises still plagues the world today almost as much as the effects of the radiation do. Go and watch Chernobyl. Listen to it; take it in and remember my favourite line;

The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all.

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Sam's Score: 9

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Chernobyl is available on Amazon Prime Video and home media.