Chernobyl (Johan Renck, May 6, 2019) Movie • Page 11

I feel like every episode had it's own side story going on though? I like that aspect. You have the main crew dealing with the big picture, but then you break off and see the divers, the miners, the liquidators.

My only real complaint is I would've liked to see/at least hear about the concrete structure they built around the plant.

 

the podcast is also absolutely fantastic.... i wish more filmamkers did this to accompany a film/show. I think it shows immense confidence. Like, the guy knows he did a great/thorough job, so he's like "Yeah lets talk about it!" I like that he admits certain things weren't accurate (and that's fine, no one expects 100% accuracy on the small details)..and yeah...

They could've used slav actors sure, but it's true, after a few minutes you forget about it. It's definitely better than actors doing a fake russian accent.

 

I’m sure there are amazing Russian actors out there that could take these roles and be equally effective. The thing is, fair or not, they probably couldn’t have got the right funding or be picked up by HBO without the big names attached.

Just one of those things, I guess. And I doubt many people have an issue with it, so it is what it is.

 

I guess for me it might have been that the liquidation story seemed to be less “immediate” in nature compared to the divers and the miners who were both on the actual scene and interacting with our main crew. It was certainly super upsetting and affecting, but sort of the only time we really stepped outside to see what else was going on in the recovery without it coming back to the big picture.

 

Some amazing photos here of the history of Chernobyl

 

That finale made me think of this kick ass song:

 

More for the Europeans, but still, hahahha

 

Not great, not terrible...

 

Putin Wants To Make Russian Version Of ’Chernobyl’ That Blames The CIA

Uhhh.. wow.

 

What HBO’s “Chernobyl” Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong

Some of this article is silly if not outright lazy analysis, but I do think it gets to a genuine criticism you can give the show: of course they acknowledge that Khomyuk is a fictional conglomeration for narrative's sake, but the show often pushed it into absurd territory for the sake of a cliche payoff. Khomyuk would often be used as a corny way for the show to hold the audience's hand and say "Look here! This thing I'm saying right here is the point!" instead of just doing so by showing us the even worse reality of the situation. It reminded me of Hidden Figures in that way.

I also felt this with the depiction of someone like Dyatlov. I imagine he was a total bastard as depicted, but especially in the final episode it feels like the show tries to have it both ways and say "it was the system but also at the same time it was this guy in particular because everyone else in the control room was clearly trying to do the reasonable thing."

 

Agreed that both of those dramatizations were some of the weaker parts of the show. I really liked that they backed off portraying Dyatlov in that way after the first episode, but then they went back to it in the end. It was good for it as a TV show but took it out of the reality to have a clear moustache twirling villain.

And I appreciate the fact that they specified Watson’s purpose for streamlining everything (and she portrayed it very well), but her whole character definitely is over the top compared to the realism of the rest of it.

 

But do we know what Dyatlov was like in real life? Maybe he was an evil bastard who blamed everything that happened on other people? That article about how he still didn’t accept blame after his prison sentence certainly makes it seem like they weren’t straying that far from how he was portrayed in the miniseries

 

Oh, I’m sure he was, but it was still over the top and simplified for the sake of having someone to clearly root against. Maybe it’s a case of “reality is unrealistic”, but the specifics of his actions compared to every other person in the room/show just stand out a lot. Most people were portrayed as complex, and he was as well for parts of it, but the specifics just seemed like artistic license instead of brutal truth.

 

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I was reading that the whole "Bridge of Death" thing was a completely unverified myth with no real evidence to support it, and that one person has even spoken with a Russian who rode his bike over it as a child when the accident happened, thought it was boring, and biked away, so clearly that's one person who lived through it

Disappointing how they presented it almost like it was a fact in the epilogue that everyone on it died

 

It’s also a super specific thing to pick out, but I thought it was strange that the epilogue said the official Soviet death toll was unchanged to this day. Surely any update wouldn’t be able to work retroactively, right? I can’t remember the exact sentence but it seemed sort of out of place to me.

 

And the finale is still a 10 on IMDB!

 

Masha Gessen is about as legit as they come when it comes to insight into Russia and the Soviet Union, so you gotta respect her, but there’s some weird criticisms in that piece.

In particular, she notes “It would be harder to show a system digging its own grave instead of an ambitious, evil man causing the disaster”, which is odd since I thought that’s exactly what the show did a great job of showing. Dyatlov was a symptom.

She also complains about the pets never being seen through the eyes of the owners, which I’m not sure what that would have added. Its easy enough for the audience to see the pets that way on their own. They don’t need a character to do that for them.

 

When they said “the official Soviet death toll” I was immediately like...nothing has been the “official Soviet” anything for 30 years now lol

 

I’m glad someone else knows what I’m talking about with that one, lol.

 

Nice

 

I've been trying to buy Voices from Chernobyl (the book that Mazin based a ton of these stories on) and it's out of stock/out of print seemingly everywhere? Amazon said they were taking preorders as it came out on June 7th, 2019 (it's been out for a while) and now it's just out of stock. I was curious of the ethics of Mazin basically poaching these stories without the series *officially* being based on the book, but at very least it seems it's driving people to buy Svetlana Alexievich's book.

 

Looks like we may end up with some real backlash after all instead of the fake contrarian kind. Some of his tweets in the politics thread were not a good look.

 

Can I have backlash on all y’all scoffing on my initial backlash suggestion?

Nothing good is good.