“What is the cost of lies?”
Caution: This review contains descriptions of suicide and animals being harmed.
This is the last line of the TV miniseries Chernobyl, which over the course of its five episodes, answers the question thusly: 600,000 men conscripted, 300,000 people displaced, and up to 93,000 dead. But according to the Soviet government, the offical number of dead is only 31.
Chernobyl is a disaster movie in the same vein as The Day After (1983) and Testament (1983)—government is the villain, and there’s a creeping sense of inevitability and dread throughout. Yes, there’s a massive explosion in the #4 reactor at the Vladimir I. Lenin nuclear plant. But it happened because of the lethal Soviet combination of misinformation, denial, and top-down control.
Episode 1 opens with Soviet nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) dictating his story onto a set of cassette tapes, which he then smuggles out from under the nose of his KGB watchers. He returns to his apartment, sets out multiple dishes of food for his cat, gets on a chair (off-camera), puts a noose around his neck, and kicks the chair out from under himself. How it comes to this is the story of the rest of the episodes.
We flash back to April 26, 1986. Everything is drab, washed out. In the middle of the night, a woman in a small city in Belarus gets up for a drink of water and sees a flash of light in the distance. Although no one knows it yet, the fall of the Soviet Union has just started.
People at the plant panic—they thought they were just running a safety test. While firefighters begin a hopeless battle with the blaze, the nearby Pripyat city council meets with the arrogant chief engineer, Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) who refuses to believe that the core has exploded. Their first instinct, of course, is to keep the people from “undermining the fruits of their own labors”: “When people ask questions that are not in their best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the state to the state.” They decide to seal off the city: no one can leave, and the phone lines will be cut. The next day sees unknowing townspeople going about their daily lives, as a dead bird falls from the sky.
“When people ask questions that are not in their best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the state to the state.”
Episode 2 begins with Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear physicist at the Belarus nuclear institute (Emily Watson, playing a composite of dozens of actual scientists) detecting increased radiation coming from outside her office. She and her colleague quickly deduce that it’s coming from Chernobyl, which spells disaster given the distance the radiation had to travel to reach them. She immediately sets out for Pripyat.
Meanwhile, it’s bedlam at both the reactor site and the local hospital, where at least some people are beginning to realize that they’re seeing trauma caused by radiation. In consultation with a senior Communist Party official (Boris Shcherbina, played by Stellan Skarsgård), Legasov and the local leaders decide to drop sand and boron on the fire, but most of it misses. Only after Sweden and the U.S. eventually detect the radiation, some 36 hours after the explosion, is Pripyat (population more than 49,000) evacuated.
Episode 3 shows us a pregnant wife (Jessie Buckley) finding her firefighter husband in a Moscow hospital 4 days after the explosion. Against the nurses’ orders, she spends hours with him, touching him often. Also at the hospital is Khomyuk, who is interviewing the survivors to create the timeline of events. Dyatlov refuses to speak with her.
Back at Chernobyl, Legasov and Shcherbina have recruited a group of coal miners to excavate the ground underneath the still-burning reactor and install a heat exchanger (cooling pad), which will a) use up all the liquid nitrogen in Russia and b) prevent the leak of radiation into the groundwater. This effort will take a month, during most of which the fire above will continue. And even then, the extremely radioactive graphite on the roof will kill anyone who stays there longer than 90 seconds.
When the immediate fire danger is over, then the “long war” of cleanup begins. They’ll need to evacuate all people within 2600 square kilometers of the reactor, raze the forest and kill any animals within 100 square kilometers, and construct a containment structure over the plant itself. It will take 3 years and 750,000 men, minimum.
Episode 4, beginning 4 months after the explosion, is extremely difficult to watch. It focuses first on the cleanup efforts in the surrounding area below—including pets and livestock being shot—and on the reactor’s roof, where more than 3800 men are risking their lives to remove the graphite.
Meanwhile, Khomyuk is homing in on the root causes of the explosion. Turns out a report had previously warned of a possible malfunction with the plant’s cutoff switch under extreme conditions, such as those present during the safety test being conducted that night. The government had censored the report, though. Dyatlov is still denying everything.
Episode 5 starts by showing us the run-up to the explosion and the actual event. Dyatlov is shown ignoring all the warning signs to complete the test on schedule (and thereby be in line for a promotion).
In July 1987, Dyatlov and two local officials go on trial. Khomyuk and Legasov walk us through the events, minute by minute, showing us how a perfect storm of incompetence, arrogance, inexperience, and cheap expediency made the explosion inevitable. Legasov is taken by the KGB after the trial and told that his testimony will be suppressed and denied, even if there were other Soviet nuclear scientists in the courtroom who heard it. He will be shunned, forgotten. Which brings us back to the beginning of Episode 1.
The basis for the miniseries was a 1997 oral history (in English, Chernobyl Prayer/Voices from Chernobyl) compiled by Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. She went on to win the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Other than the character of Khomyuk, the characters and stories in Chernobyl are real, taken from the book. Chernobyl is not a documentary, however.
For one thing, all of the actors are English-speaking Brits (although all of the signage and written materials are in Russian). It’s also extremely unlikely, for example, that the fictional Khomyuk would confront and even insult a minor Party apparatchik, or that Legasov would ask the Central Committee, “Forgive me—maybe I’ve just spent too much time in my lab, or maybe I’m just stupid. Is this really the way it all works? An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lives that is made by some apparatchik, some career Party man?” Also unlikely is the fact that a fetus would absorb radiation “for” the pregnant woman. It would absorb proportionately more than the woman, certainly, but not instead of.
Chernobyl is an exceptional piece of filmmaking. The mid-1980s Soviet Union becomes a character in its own right, with the drab colors and concrete-block buildings accurately reflecting their time, and the cinematography is gorgeous. The score is minimal, adding to the cinéma vérité feel. The acting is excellent throughout. A few characters are left dangling, and some of the scenes run a bit long, but these are minor quibbles in a much large and important work. Highly recommended.
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Chernobyl TV-MA 330 min
Directed by Johan Renck
Written by Craig Mazin
Featuring Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Harris, Paul Ritter, Jessie Buckley