Created, written, and executive produced by Craig Mazin, Chernobyl is directed by Johan Renck as part-horror movie, part-cautionary tale, and part-political treatise. Equal parts political deconstruction and painstaking recreation of what it must have been like to live through the worst nuclear disaster in history, the show presents a terrifying, nightmare vision of how bad things can get when hard scientific facts are made subservient to political agendas, and governments strive to undermine not only scientific expertise but the very nature of truth itself (the Soviet Union was a big fan of "alternative facts" long before the GOP). Chernobyl begins and ends by asking the viewer to ponder the cost of cumulative nation-wide lies. However, it's just as interested in celebrating the heroes as it is assigning blame, and in that sense, it has an extraordinary sense of humanism.
The acting is immense, the writing is incisive and terrifying, the aesthetic is exceptional, and the show was a worthy winner of no less than 10 Emmys from its 18 nominations, 7 of its 11 nominations at the British Academy Television Craft Awards, and two of its four Golden Globe nominations. All in all, Chernobyl is that rarest of beasts - a show which lives up to the hype.
April 26, 1986, 1:23am; near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR. Reactor No. 4 at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (aka Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) explodes, sending out masses of radioactive material. Fire crews are called, but neither they nor the local people have any idea of the severity of the situation. As the Central Committee tries to keep a lid on things, a commission is assembled to investigate the disaster. The commission's head is Boris Shcherbina (a career-best performance from Stellan Skarsgård), Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a devout party-man. The commission's scientific expert is Valery Legasov (a mesmerising Jared Harris), deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, who immediately realises that the accident is much more serious than the government are saying. The show opens with the explosion and then follows Legasov and Shcherbina as they investigate why it happened and unexpectedly form a strong friendship.
Thematically, Chernobyl is not subtle. The opening line is "What is the cost of lies?", and this issue is front and centre for the entire five episodes. The show presents the Soviet Union as a place where lying and statecraft were one and the same, and in so doing, it illustrates what can happen when institutions of government put political ideology above objective facts, when egotistical politicians disregard everything that experts are telling them in favour of their own ill-informed theories (sound familiar?). The first episode in particular gives us some fine illustrations of a system obsessed with committees, bureaucracy, and secrecy, all built upon an unnecessarily complicated and rigid hierarchy. For example, shortly after the explosion, the plant's manager, Bryukhanov (Con O'Neill), explains to the Pripyat Executive Committee,
I have spoken directly to Deputy Secretary Maryin. Maryin spoke to Deputy Chief Frolyshev, Frolyshev to Central Committee member Dolghikh, and Dolghikh to General Secretary Gorbachev. Because the Central Committee has the greatest respect for the work of the Pripyat Executive Committee, they have asked me to brief you on matters as they stand.
If you think this is an exaggeration, all of these people are real, and this is precisely the sequence of how the information got from Bryukhanov to Gorbachev. As it's presented in the show, there's nothing remotely subtle about it, as we're invited to shake our heads at the ridiculousness of it all. An even more telling example of governmental secrecy occurs in the same scene, as Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), a member of the Pripyat Executive Committee states,
It is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labour - and to leave matters of the State to the State. We seal off the city. No one leaves. We cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how you keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour.
This speech is met with applause. There's a lot to unpack here, but the line "keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour" is especially telling. Essentially, "keep the people uninformed so they don't ask us to explain ourselves."
And, to a certain extent, much of the rest of the show depicts how that is exactly what the government has accomplished. If there's an overriding mindset amongst the Soviet people, it's a sense of civic duty, borne of a genuine belief in socialism and total trust in the Central Committee. Not all characters share this trust, but enough of them do to make it an undeniable trope. And for the most part, the show presents this sense of duty to the State as deeply honourable, worthy of a great deal of respect. How the State elicits, manipulates and exploits these feelings is being criticised, not the feelings themselves - a vital distinction. This is seen most clearly when one contrasts the noble self-sacrifices made by multiple characters, often knowingly giving their lives for the State and for one another, with the callous way the politburo look on such sacrifices - they expect people to give their lives because lives have to be given. As Shcherbina says at one point, "you will do it because it must be done". To the Politburo, the proletariat is not a collective of individuals, it is a single body, and it can afford to lose a person here and there without any significant damage.
Aesthetically, Chernobyl opens with the explosion, throwing the audience into the chaos and confusion. However, rather than placing us in the control room at the moment of the explosion, we see it through the closed window of a character who doesn't even notice it happening until the shockwave hits a couple of seconds later. It's a wholly unexpected way to begin, presenting a massive real-life disaster not from the perspective of spectacle (Deepwater Horizon (2016), I'm looking at you), but from a subjective human perspective. This immediately sets up the show's interest in people. The helicopter crash seen in the trailer is shot the same way - focusing on human reactions to the crash rather than the crash itself.
As for the cinematography generally, Jakob Ihre shoots everything unfussily, with no real visual gymnastics. However, there are still moments of stark beauty and great artistry. The second episode ends with a dialogueless scene that Michael Mann would be proud of - a terrifying claustrophobic sequence shot almost entirely in pitch darkness with the only light coming from the torches carried by the men on screen. This episode also features perhaps the single most extraordinary shot in the series - a high elevation shot of Pripyat looking down at the residents being evacuated onto a fleet of buses. In the background, the power plant can be seen still burning, whilst the people and the plant are bifurcated by the flats in which they used to live. This is as good an example of thematic photography as you're likely to find.
As for problems, well, if there is one, it is probably that the characters are a little too black and white - the 'good' characters are practically saintly, and the 'bad' characters are almost pure evil. Legasov, for example, is depicted as a truth-teller who disapproves of the Soviet system and cares only for the facts. In reality, he was a party man, and he initially agreed with the cover up. The same issue is apparent with Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a composite character representing the many scientists who aided Legasov. Watson is good in the role, but as written, she embodies multiple hackneyed Hollywood clichés, and if Mazin wanted a prominent female character, why not use Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation? In essence, many of the characters are either stupid or evil, or both, while the scientists are righteous prophets. And there's not a lot of ground in between.
At its core, the show is most interested in what happens when governments stop listening to science, when every smart person in the room is telling a leader one thing, and he or she decides to ignore it based on nothing other than ideology or ego (and yes, Trump's attitude to the ever-worsening global climate crisis is very much the target). An exceptional piece of television in pretty much every way, Chernobyl is as terrifying as it is compelling, as heartbreaking as it is eye-opening.
And all of this is not even to mention the dogs. I'm just not ready to talk about the dogs.
The acting is immense, the writing is incisive and terrifying, the aesthetic is exceptional, and the show was a worthy winner of no less than 10 Emmys from its 18 nominations, 7 of its 11 nominations at the British Academy Television Craft Awards, and two of its four Golden Globe nominations. All in all, Chernobyl is that rarest of beasts - a show which lives up to the hype.
April 26, 1986, 1:23am; near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR. Reactor No. 4 at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (aka Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) explodes, sending out masses of radioactive material. Fire crews are called, but neither they nor the local people have any idea of the severity of the situation. As the Central Committee tries to keep a lid on things, a commission is assembled to investigate the disaster. The commission's head is Boris Shcherbina (a career-best performance from Stellan Skarsgård), Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a devout party-man. The commission's scientific expert is Valery Legasov (a mesmerising Jared Harris), deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, who immediately realises that the accident is much more serious than the government are saying. The show opens with the explosion and then follows Legasov and Shcherbina as they investigate why it happened and unexpectedly form a strong friendship.
Thematically, Chernobyl is not subtle. The opening line is "What is the cost of lies?", and this issue is front and centre for the entire five episodes. The show presents the Soviet Union as a place where lying and statecraft were one and the same, and in so doing, it illustrates what can happen when institutions of government put political ideology above objective facts, when egotistical politicians disregard everything that experts are telling them in favour of their own ill-informed theories (sound familiar?). The first episode in particular gives us some fine illustrations of a system obsessed with committees, bureaucracy, and secrecy, all built upon an unnecessarily complicated and rigid hierarchy. For example, shortly after the explosion, the plant's manager, Bryukhanov (Con O'Neill), explains to the Pripyat Executive Committee,
I have spoken directly to Deputy Secretary Maryin. Maryin spoke to Deputy Chief Frolyshev, Frolyshev to Central Committee member Dolghikh, and Dolghikh to General Secretary Gorbachev. Because the Central Committee has the greatest respect for the work of the Pripyat Executive Committee, they have asked me to brief you on matters as they stand.
If you think this is an exaggeration, all of these people are real, and this is precisely the sequence of how the information got from Bryukhanov to Gorbachev. As it's presented in the show, there's nothing remotely subtle about it, as we're invited to shake our heads at the ridiculousness of it all. An even more telling example of governmental secrecy occurs in the same scene, as Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), a member of the Pripyat Executive Committee states,
It is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labour - and to leave matters of the State to the State. We seal off the city. No one leaves. We cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how you keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour.
This speech is met with applause. There's a lot to unpack here, but the line "keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour" is especially telling. Essentially, "keep the people uninformed so they don't ask us to explain ourselves."
And, to a certain extent, much of the rest of the show depicts how that is exactly what the government has accomplished. If there's an overriding mindset amongst the Soviet people, it's a sense of civic duty, borne of a genuine belief in socialism and total trust in the Central Committee. Not all characters share this trust, but enough of them do to make it an undeniable trope. And for the most part, the show presents this sense of duty to the State as deeply honourable, worthy of a great deal of respect. How the State elicits, manipulates and exploits these feelings is being criticised, not the feelings themselves - a vital distinction. This is seen most clearly when one contrasts the noble self-sacrifices made by multiple characters, often knowingly giving their lives for the State and for one another, with the callous way the politburo look on such sacrifices - they expect people to give their lives because lives have to be given. As Shcherbina says at one point, "you will do it because it must be done". To the Politburo, the proletariat is not a collective of individuals, it is a single body, and it can afford to lose a person here and there without any significant damage.
Aesthetically, Chernobyl opens with the explosion, throwing the audience into the chaos and confusion. However, rather than placing us in the control room at the moment of the explosion, we see it through the closed window of a character who doesn't even notice it happening until the shockwave hits a couple of seconds later. It's a wholly unexpected way to begin, presenting a massive real-life disaster not from the perspective of spectacle (Deepwater Horizon (2016), I'm looking at you), but from a subjective human perspective. This immediately sets up the show's interest in people. The helicopter crash seen in the trailer is shot the same way - focusing on human reactions to the crash rather than the crash itself.
As for the cinematography generally, Jakob Ihre shoots everything unfussily, with no real visual gymnastics. However, there are still moments of stark beauty and great artistry. The second episode ends with a dialogueless scene that Michael Mann would be proud of - a terrifying claustrophobic sequence shot almost entirely in pitch darkness with the only light coming from the torches carried by the men on screen. This episode also features perhaps the single most extraordinary shot in the series - a high elevation shot of Pripyat looking down at the residents being evacuated onto a fleet of buses. In the background, the power plant can be seen still burning, whilst the people and the plant are bifurcated by the flats in which they used to live. This is as good an example of thematic photography as you're likely to find.
As for problems, well, if there is one, it is probably that the characters are a little too black and white - the 'good' characters are practically saintly, and the 'bad' characters are almost pure evil. Legasov, for example, is depicted as a truth-teller who disapproves of the Soviet system and cares only for the facts. In reality, he was a party man, and he initially agreed with the cover up. The same issue is apparent with Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a composite character representing the many scientists who aided Legasov. Watson is good in the role, but as written, she embodies multiple hackneyed Hollywood clichés, and if Mazin wanted a prominent female character, why not use Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation? In essence, many of the characters are either stupid or evil, or both, while the scientists are righteous prophets. And there's not a lot of ground in between.
At its core, the show is most interested in what happens when governments stop listening to science, when every smart person in the room is telling a leader one thing, and he or she decides to ignore it based on nothing other than ideology or ego (and yes, Trump's attitude to the ever-worsening global climate crisis is very much the target). An exceptional piece of television in pretty much every way, Chernobyl is as terrifying as it is compelling, as heartbreaking as it is eye-opening.
And all of this is not even to mention the dogs. I'm just not ready to talk about the dogs.