Why HBO's Chernobyl series is scarier than any horror

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The authors managed to convey the everyday life of ordinary people and the real horror of the tragedy.

The American HBO channel, together with the British network Sky, is releasing a new mini-series dedicated to one of the worst man-made disasters in history - the Chernobyl accident.

Many documentaries and feature films have already been filmed about the event. But from the works of recent years, it is this project that will surely become the brightest statement about the tragedy. Indeed, despite the fact that the series was filmed by Americans and Europeans, it turned out to be really alive and realistic. But the main thing is that the main emphasis is not on the catastrophe itself, but on its consequences and the reactions of different people: from top bosses to ordinary housewives.

Ominous realism

The first and most important thing that the authors of the series did was not to turn it into a traditional disaster film. Although all the prerequisites for this exist. But instead of showing explosions and destruction on the screen, the authors show the accident itself from two main angles. From the inside - through the reaction of the station workers - and from afar, as ordinary residents saw it.

The explosion itself looks like a distant bright flash in the window of a simple Soviet apartment. And this is the worst of all, because so many saw him.

At the same time, the station workers do not know how to react. After all, many simply do not believe that such a thing could happen. In addition, the creators of "Chernobyl" took an even more important and harsh step: they added real recordings of negotiations after the explosion to the first series. When it was still believed that the roof of the station was just on fire, and firefighters were sent there.

Here, the very awareness of the catastrophe, the consequences of which the viewer already knows, but the heroes do not yet, is terrifying. While the station is trying to understand what happened, people go out with their children to look at the fire and are even surprised at its beauty.

And such everyday scenes are frightening even further. Nurses at the hospital dump contaminated clothing. One of the central characters, scientist Valery Legasov, reads a report, and his hands begin to shake from fright.

This is worse than any fictional monster that destroys a city in a movie. After all, everything shows a real human reaction to real events. Silence of the tragedy, panic near the hospital, where people are not allowed to visit their relatives - this is given no less attention than the story of the disaster itself and the elimination of its consequences.

And here it is even difficult to single out a main character. More time is devoted to Legasov than to the others. With him, or rather, with his death two years after the explosion, the whole plot begins. But in general, the series covers the reaction of completely different people and shows the tragedy through the eyes of both senior officials and the wife of a simple firefighter.

Soviet everyday life

It is equally important that the authors of the series were able not to go into unnecessary "cranberries", creating a visual series and story. Literally from the very first shots, those who found the eighties will recognize the most typical everyday moments: saucers with a gilded border, a trash can with a lid, a mongrel cat, Soviet wallpaper on the walls, clothes.

All this allows you to quickly forget about the foreign origin of the project. Moreover, the actors were selected very carefully, avoiding the unnatural Hollywood gloss. Jared Harris even looks like his real prototype Valery Legasov. Stellan Skarsgård is not so similar to Boris Shcherbina, but he looks quite like a typical party leader.

Most of the main characters do not overplay, do not look like caricatures and do not try to copy the Slavic pronunciation. They just play the role of living people, and literally 10 minutes later it is forgotten that they do not speak Russian.

Of course, there were some excesses in some moments. This is especially true of the Soviet leadership: several times the characters break into tirades about Lenin, the party and the country, and in a tense situation it looks almost comical. And ordinary people call each other comrades and refer to each other by their first and last names.

But only the most skeptical viewers will want to find fault with this. After all, the realism of the atmosphere of Soviet life can be the envy of most Russian projects in recent years.

In addition to the already mentioned recordings of negotiations, in the series you can hear announcements in Russian and even a poem by Konstantin Simonov, which is read on the radio. And in the context of events, it starts to sound even worse.

According to Russian customs, only conflagrations

On the Russian land scattered behind, Comrades were dying before our eyes, In Russian, torn the shirt on the chest.

Konstantin Simonov

Truth and fiction

It seems that when creating the series, the authors learned one main truth. The Chernobyl disaster is terrible in itself, nothing needs to be thought out. In this accident, its consequences and the investigation of the circumstances, there is already enough tragedy. Therefore, in order to create a really catchy story, they only needed to retell what actually happened and supplement it with small descriptions of the lives of ordinary people.

Indeed, in the case of a story about the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, reality is worse than any fiction.

This does not mean that the authors follow the letter of the documents exactly. There are also just artistic additions, and heroes that did not exist in reality. There are also some factual errors: for example, the fall of a helicopter caught on a crane is shown one day after the accident. In reality, it happened six months later.

It is difficult to say whether this is a flaw of the scriptwriters or a deliberate artistic move, but against the general background, such inconsistencies are lost. More importantly, "Chernobyl" does not try to show specifically the right and the wrong. Everyone here is ambiguous. And the same Shcherbina, who gives the impression of a typical bureaucrat, often makes sound decisions further. And Legasov, on the other hand, tells people in the drink-room that they have nothing to worry about.

In the actions of most of the heroes, purely human motives appear. Someone is trying to shift the blame onto another, someone is ready to risk themselves in order to save people, someone simply refuses to believe in what is happening. But it's not a secret for anyone that the leadership really tried to hide the accident itself and its consequences, leaving the residents of Pripyat in the dark for an impermissibly long time.

Disregard for people is the leitmotif of the whole story. But this is not a criticism of the Soviet system just for the sake of criticism, but another important point, which in the series scares with its realism. Many die without even understanding why, residents are evacuated without explaining the reasons. And it all looks terribly mundane.

Against the background of such content, the eye does not even notice the quality of the filming, but they are here really at the highest level. In tough dynamic moments, this is a shaking hand-held camera, in protracted general shots - shooting from the air. Everyday scenes are replaced by frames of dying animals. But all this does not violate the general restrained style of the series, filmed in pale colors, as if the picture was sprinkled with ash from an explosion.

They filmed a lot about the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and will certainly be filmed more than once. But today HBO's "Chernobyl" performs all the tasks assigned to it. He recalls that the catastrophe, which over the years has become a kind of myth and plot for science fiction, in fact led to dire consequences for many thousands of people. And, worst of all, at the time of the accident, few people realized it.