Chernobyl (2019)

Sooner or later movie and TV productions swarm all historical events. Everything we see on the news becomes an entertainment event. So there's no surprise that the Soviet nuclear disaster of 1986 gets the treatment—indeed, there have already been several, from the well-regarded 2006 French documentary The Battle of Chernobyl to the schlocky 2012 horror movie of the month Chernobyl Diaries. HBO steps up impressively with this five-hour-plus miniseries docudrama. I'm not sure how much new information it bears, but a lot was new to me—all I knew before is that it was bad. Now I know more about how bad, and why. Across its looping span, loosely built out of on-scene dramatizations and later investigations, the miniseries dives into the details of both the science and Soviet bureaucracy. It takes various liberties along the way, most notably reducing dozens of Soviet scientists to a single fictional character (played with her usual flashing brilliance by Emily Watson). These scientists quietly researched the incident as far from Soviet government eyes as they could, which makes her come off a little unlikely and superheroic, more of a device. In fact, five hours does not feel like enough to tell this whole story—there's too much science for that and too much Soviet bureaucracy too. It's complicated. Thus, various other devices are employed, some more awkward than others, such as making the climax a courtroom drama with fundamental factual distortions—our scientist hero, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), has his big miniseries moment and speech there, though he was not actually at that trial at all. At its best, Chernobyl feels like propulsive science fiction made horror because it is grounded in strange reality. It tells us the clothes worn by the original firefighters on the scene, for example, are secured away to this day because they are still dangerously radioactive. It not only features scenes at the "Bridge of Death," where townsfolk gathered to watch the original fire and marvel at the colors, but it also pushes the urban legend that they all died of radioactive poisoning within months. Chernobyl is always chilling and thrilling to watch. It doesn't miss an opportunity to freak us out with stories like that. In the context, they have a high probability of being true. The miniseries may have some misrepresentations, but as far as I can tell most fall closer to the category of dramatic license. And, at a moment in history when consideration is on the rise for nuclear power as a mitigation for global warming, I think it's good to get an emotional object lesson in the dangers, which hopefully sends us scurrying to review the actual facts and trade-offs. Recommended—HBO or whoever should not wait 33 years to do the Fukushima story. Also, we need a better Deepwater Horizon oil spill movie pronto.