Chernobyl
A 5-part Miniseries
DVD - 2019



Opinion
From the critics

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Add a QuoteThanks to contributors at wikiquote, many pages of full context quotes for peruse:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
Archive photos shown on screen as the music Vichnaya Pamyat (Eternal Memory) plays during the postscript at the end of final episode:
Valery Legasov
Various scientists who participated in the battle to clean up Chernobyl (Ulana Khomyuk was createdto represent them all)
Boris Shcherbina
Images from the actual trial
Anatoly Dyatlov
Valery Khodemchuk
Abandoned rooms in Pripyat
The Bridge of Death
The miners
The interior of damaged reactor building 4
Pripyat from above (2 miles away from the nuke plant with almost 50,000 people in 1986)
... and more.
Thanks to contributors at wikiquote, many pages of full context quotes for peruse:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
Like many peoples living in perpetual civil wars, long famines and subjects of ruthless dictators, an old woman who had lived through many hardships was ordered by a soldier to evacuate:
I'm 82. I've lived here my whole life. ... You're not the first soldier to stand here with a gun. When I was 12, the Revolution came. Tsar's men, then Bolsheviks. Boys like you marching in lines. They told us to leave. No. Then there was Stalin and his famine, the Holodomor. My parents died. Two of my sisters died. They told the rest of us to leave. No. Then the Great War. German boys, Russian boys. More soldiers, more famine, more bodies. My brothers never came home. But I stayed, and I'm still here. After all that I have seen... so I should leave now, because of something I cannot see at all?

Comment
Add a CommentEvery lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. The Soviets found out the hard way, as their country ruptured and broke apart because of the lies over Chernobyl. Gorbachev himself says the soviet union broke apart because of Chernobyl. Lesson learned, we are all inconsequential humans.
"What is the cost of lies?"
This is one of the best miniseries I have ever watched. My partner started watching it and would not stop talking about it, so we decided to watch it together. Wow. The music is the perfect level of creepy and the story is solid. There is also a podcast that goes with it and explains some of the choices made in shooting the film. For example, they chose not to have Russian accents because they wanted the actors to focus on acting, not on their accents.
The last episode in the series explains clearly what happened and what went wrong. It was a little difficult for me to understand exactly what happened, until that point, but it makes sense to film it in the order they did. The actors are amazing and the scenes are riveting.
I will say that I do not think this would have been secured if it was not for the USSR regime at the time. They were able to easily sacrifice lives and move supplies so that the reactor was contained. A lot of bad had to happen for a little bit of good.
How many of us would give our live to be the whistle blower? At first I thought how wrong the USSR political system was and is. As we progressed through the movie I began to see many parallels in our own Government. We may not have a Chernoble, but we do over spending and not funding important areas.
MRI
PERF
An amazing insight into the causes of the Chernobyl disaster, April 26, 1986.
AUD
R
Really good series.
My only complaint is that I wish they would have used Russian accents.
Such a well-told story and tragic glimpse into the not-so-distant nuclear past.
This is a riveting (but terribly depressing) account of the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl that occurred during a botched safety test, releasing more radiation into the Earth’s atmosphere than any other man-made event in history and causing incredible destruction and death.
The dramatization is very realistic, so be warned that the images are horrible and can seriously impact a sensitive viewer. The courage of clean-up crew was inspiring and it helped to offset the cowardice and lies that hung over the whole disaster.
There are five episodes. I'd suggest not watching just before going to sleep....
I sat down to watch the first hour and 5.5 hours later, I finished the whole thing (maybe add .5 for a bathroom break or 2).
This tells the story of the Soviet system, which has all the usual bureaucratic layers of incompetency and inefficiency, but with a Stalinist twist. If you want to know what a Stalinist twist is, watch this.
It also tells the story of great human courage, suffering and willpower. The normal roll-out of the Soviet system in this situation would have resulted in a disaster 100 times worse than it was. To prevent that from happening, just the right people, e.g., scientists, miners, soldiers and government officials, had to step up to the plate and do the near impossible.
Everything about the production was superlative (save one), especially the screenplay.
SPOILER ALERT: The one exception was the "shooting the dogs" sequence, which could have been shortened quite a bit.
So captivating, super well made, excellent acting. I wasn't bored a second. Recommending it to all friends. Learned a lot!
this is crap