Chernobyl HBO Miniseries

This scene from episode one really hit me hard and I knew this series was going to be special.
The beauty and the horror.
The kids playing and dancing in the radioactive ash.
The pulsating musical score.
Just beyond words.

 

Same here. It's a British production, with primarily British actors. So I think the point was for everyone to use their normal accents (Stellan Skarsgaard sounding Swedish, for instance) rather than try to do Russian/Ukrainian accents, probably terribly, and sound like Boris and Natasha, dahlink.

 

Good scene.

It annoyed me initially in that,”how can they be so stupid??”

But no one had an idea of the enormity of the catastrophe at the time. Kind of like dancing to the ash of Mt. Saint Helens years ago in Washington State. I lived there at the time and no one knew what a horrible mess it would turn out to be and that’s sans the god awful radiation poisoning. People are clueless and stupid.

 

Kinda like the water in Flint, too........

 

Can only see the thumbnail of that, as guess what, Sky have blocked it in my country. But, just from the single image alone reminds me of this...

Sigur Rós - (Untitled) [Official Music Video]

 

First movie about Chernobyl was russian and was released in 1979 by the state company Mosfilm.
....................................................................................................................................................

 

@Plinko also reminded us earlier in this thread. It's still on my watch list. Next Russian movie for me will probably be the Criterion release of "War and Peace". Been looking forward to watching a remastered version of this.

 

You could tell I'm almost one of those kids. I was 1 year old living in Kyiv at the time.

Haven't watched the series and probably won't as I don't do much movies but I think it's good that the series got this tragedy a much higher level of exposure than it probably ever had. Things like shouldn't happen again.

 

1979? I don't get the joke.

 

"'Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?' That's perfect. They should put that on our money."



Brilliant series. Haunting.

 

He is talking about Tarkovsky's Stalker.

 

If the party says you didn’t see what you saw, than it’s impossible for you to have seen it.
Now, let Brezhnev give you a make-up kiss and we’ll forget your little counter-revolutionary slip up ever occurred.

 

I loved every episode. I did have nightmares after the first one. I had mixed feelings about the shock of seeing Eastender's hot Alex Ferns "giving it his all" in this scene. It was an uneasy mixture of compassion for him and his miners' plight and me being a big old perv.
Woof!

 

The wildlife and offspring of the abandoned domestic animals are also unafraid of people since they see so few of them. I know some organizations have been working on spaying/neutering the many dogs there and are now allowed to bring puppies out of the exclusion zone for adoption once they've been checked for contamination -- which at this point would only come from, say, sitting on some hot dirt and getting some particles on their fur.

It's amazing to me that the plant and Pripyat are now tourist attractions.

 

One of the horribly familiar things about the show was the crazy denialism of the plant managers and bureaucrats. I vividly remember reading discussion forum threads (not here) while Fukushima was happening, where all these self-styled "experts" constantly harped on the many, many safeguards and how things going really wrong was just impossible because technology! and engineers! had every contingency covered and under control, and "of course there couldn't possibly be a meltdown." And the people who questioned that based on observations of what was actually happening were labeled hysterical alarmist idiots.

Anyhow, my fave element of the show is how well it managed to communicate the menace of something invisible and intangible as well as the obliviousness of the ordinary folks since they'd been kept totally uninformed. Totally safe! No need to have emergency procedures in place!

I also loved how they made a point of starting right at the moment of the explosion and studiously NOT explaining at all what had happened until it was all laid out moment by moment in court. I went right back and rewatched the whole thing (except for the dog episode, aaargh) a second time once those pieces were filled in.

 

Ha, yeah.
When I worked corporate, we had an accountant who slowly embezzled up to 3 million dollars, in 20 thousand dollar increments. Any check higher than $20,000 would’ve triggered an automatic review.
My manager complained to the corporate controller that the accountant was pulling her guys off their in-office jobs to make at least one extra bank run for him every day, sometimes two. That should’ve been a giant red flag.
The controller’s response to her? “Do your job and tell your guys to stop complaining.”

 

This was already a phenomenon before the show.
Anthony Bourdain went there:

AND, if I remember correctly, there was a kind of "Blair Witch"-style film about kids who got there, and stuff happens to them. Forgot what the film was called, though.....

 

Yes, that's what I meant -- that they have been allowing visitors there in recent years (and of course, people still worked at Chernobyl in the other parts of the plant for years after the explosion). I was in my 20s in '86, so I still think of it as being a terrifying No Person's Land, and I personally wouldn't touch the place with a 50-mile pole. I would adopt a Chernobyl puppy, though!

 

Kim Willsher reported on the world’s worst nuclear disaster from the Soviet Union. HBO’s TV version only scratches the surface, she says

The truth about Chernobyl? I saw it with my own eyes…

 

YES! Not only, yes, but HELL YES! (You know, like in Texas?)

I've only seen the first two episodes, but they accents turned me off initially. It's 2019. We don't need anymore of this "continental English," 1950s-'60s style. Russian actors, speaking English would have set a great tone, at least giving the perception of authenticity.

That said, by the time I watched the second episode the story was so compelling that the accents affected me less. I'm easily adaptable. Nevertheless, if they weren't gunning for authenticity, they might as well have cast some Bostonians or Alabamans.

 

Sadly, every single person that was on that bridge succumbed to cancer due to their exposure. It’s now called the Bridge of Death as I recall.

 

Great movie. Sadly, everyone associated with it died from one form of cancer due to exposure to toxic chemicals.

 

A dance of death.

"Words cannot express."