‘Chernobyl’: A 5-Year Reflection on 20,000 Years Worth of Consequences
The 2019 mini-series that helped cement the horrible legacy of the 1986 nuclear meltdown
In many regards, Chernobyl is more of a documentary than a TV show. Retelling the harrowing events of the 1986 nuclear meltdown with a rare faithfulness to detail, it’s a story that demands no hyperbole to keep an audience on the edge of their seats. The ground zero that the show brings hypnotically to life is one that’s expected to remain contaminated and uninhabitable for entire millennia to come.
Throughout the mini series’ brief run-time, I couldn’t help but spend much of it in open-jawed astonishment at the fact that all of this really happened.
It’s not common for any show based on historical events to be so restrained in the liberties it takes. Even in the portrayal of atrocities, there are certain freedoms that viewers will excuse.
While some of the characters in Chernobyl are fictional, and the contents of each of the behind-the-scenes conversations aren’t all actually known to the public, the show has been routinely lauded for its grounded depiction of affairs. With a few minor exceptions, the augmentations made are rooted in fair assumptions. It veers judiciously away from the dramatic impulse to overtly fabricate details of already extraordinary occurrences.
The way the showrunners attempt to realize the conversations between the criminals behind the scenes are all too believable.
Creator and writer Craig Mazin skillfully balances the technical details with gutting human drama, making complex material into something familiar, approachable, and deeply impactful. Director Johan Renck cultivates a feeling of slow-rolling tension and dread that lingers through every frame throughout the 5-hour runtime.
It’s a reasonable assumption for most people watching the show that they know loosely of the events that took place in Chernobyl. In the minds of masses, the ominous pairing of consonants conjures immediate images of nuclear fallout and The Simpsons-styled three-eyed fish. Chernobyl was something that I was taught about in history class and an occurrence whose general outline has quietly loomed in the back of my mind ever since.
But one of the powers of effective cinema or documentary work is bringing to life the events that seem like little more than free-floating concepts. And from Chernobyl’s grating and propulsive first few seconds, that effect is palpable. There’s a hair-raising tension to the onset of the show as we watch technicians scramble to avoid a catastrophe. But as viewers, we’re astutely left in the dark as to what exactly caused this incontrovertible collapse. The mystery is at once haunting and magnetic.
Though I’d been aware of the Chernobyl meltdown, its magnitude had been lost on me. I knew of the incident, but not of its instrumental role in the deterioration of the Soviet Union, nor the nefarious lengths the KGB was willing to go to cover up their complicity and prevent their citizens from fleeing near-certain death.
The proceedings surrounding the meltdown itself are staggering, but the extremes that the USSR enacted to keep their people in the dark may come as eye-opening to many viewers.
There’s an eerie sort of majesty to what takes place on screen as nuclear radiation beams into the sky and ash rains down on an unwitting populace. Children dance in the snow as adults look in awe toward the site of the explosion.
From beginning to end, few shows remain in such dire, frenetic motion as Chernobyl. Being set at a mini-series length run-time, it neither suffers the fates of shows stretched out indefinitely, nor attempts to stuff more information into the screen time than the show allows. It’s succinct but not hasty.
There’s a drab monotony to the color palettes employed that conveys the worsening circumstances and growing atmosphere of melancholy and death. The production design, costumes, and sets each contribute to a meticulous recreation of the 1980s Soviet Union.
As reality begins to set in, the atmosphere grows increasingly bleak. People go from shopping and playing in schoolyards and living their lives to being filed by militiamen into endless lines of buses. The notion of a “temporary displacement” comes across with a stark weight for anyone who understands the vaguest details of the calamity — how the land was rendered uninhabitable for an effective eternity by the nuclear fallout.
Jared Harris’s portrayal of a tortured Valery Legasov — one of the Soviet chemists who investigated the Chernobyl site — drives home what a deeply fraught time in Eastern Europe the Chernobyl tragedy represented. His portrayal captures Legasov’s moral conflict and steadfast determination to uncover the truth. He cultivates an emotional core within the short series before the time he completes his opening monologue.
Stellan Skarsgård as Boris Shcherbina, the Deputy Prime Minister, couples a Soviet stoicism with a depth of moral complexity and an ultimate desire to do good. He shifts between a loyal, say-nothing patriot and politician into a brooding defender of his people.
Emily Watson’s portrayal of Ulana Khomyuk, a fictional scientist and stand-in for multiple real-life figures, is subtle and driven. Her performance embodies a tireless pursuit of truth and justice amidst a draconian campaign of governmental denial and suppression.
There’s a heightened awareness of what took place in Chernobyl that can be attributed to the show. It makes something grave and personal out of a shared experience that was distant for even most of those alive during the disaster.
In its most brutal moments, the show is utterly graphic and difficult to watch. As the Soviet government surmises that all life within the area has been infected by radiation, soldiers are given the horrible task of killing the pets left behind. But it’s in imparting the sheer gravity of what these Ukrainian citizens faced that the TV show shines most noxiously.
A more restrained telling of the events wouldn’t have provided quite the same justice to what the Soviet citizens faced. One moment that drives home that fact like few others is when an octogenarian woman — who lived through The Russian Revolution, Stalin, and both World Wars — is forcibly removed from the home that she’s spent her entire life in.
One of Chernobyl’s greatest achievements is to encourage restraint in the face of the unwieldy tools that humans create. As Legasov explains in one pointed moment, pragmatism isn’t always possible when we encounter situations that our species has never faced before. The challenge that Chernobyl presented was unprecedented; it was a peril that the world hasn’t faced before or since.
Much of the reason for that is because lessons were learned following the tragedy and nuclear power infrastructure began to grow safer. But it’s TV shows like Chernobyl that sow the events of the 1980s USSR so deeply into the public consciousness that viewers entire generations removed from the radioactive nightmare can find a call for caution.
This article was originally published on Medium.
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An amazing mini-series. Terrifying and so well done. Great post!