Chernobyl

Johan  Renck's Chernobyl, a six part mini-series on HBO is now at its half-life -- three episodes broadcast and three to go.  The program has an intelligent script, brilliant acting, and subject matter so compelling that it would fascinate if presented with stick figures animated against a featureless grey background.  In fact, the series is presented with elaborate location sequences (it's shot in Moscow and Lithuania), chaotic crowd scenes and the most horrific special effects that I have ever seen.  It's altogether persuasive, mostly disheartening, but shot through with sequences displaying almost unimaginable valor.  In effect, the film is a combat movie, similar in some ways to Ishiru Honda's first, and best, Godzilla movie (Godzilla, King of  the Monsters! Japan 1954, USA 1956  ) -- a group of brilliant and courageous scientists marshal forces to battle a terrifying radioactive beast, the melting Chernobyl power plant portrayed as a huge throne-like inferno pumping monstrous columns of radioactive smoke into the air.  At night, the ruptured core blasts a column of ionized atoms, a death ray of neutrons, like searchlight beam into the air.  As heedless school children play in playgrounds, birds murdered by the radiation drop out of the air to twitch dying on the sidewalks.

Clearly, there might be a tendency to overdramatize the calamity at Chernobyl and hype the catastrophe will ominous signs and portents.  Renck adopts the opposite strategy -- his film is forensically clinical:  he shows the nuclear accident as it appeared to those experiencing the explosion and melt-down in real time.  No one knows what is happening; everyone initially downplays the level of danger and bureaucrats work overtime to cover-up the calamity.  The film moves relentlessly along two parallel tracks -- first, there is the explosion, fire, and attempts at remediation; second, we witness the investigation of the causes of the explosion, moving toward a step-by-step reconstruction of what occurred to trigger the crisis.  After a brief, suitably depressing prologue in which one of the principals commits suicide, apparently several years after the melt-down, the series begins in the middle of the action, with alarms sounding at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and hapless workers struggling to ascertain what is happening.  The blast itself is de-dramatized:  we see a single flash from within the apartment of one of the firefighters who will be dispatched to the reactor with predictably deadly (and horrifying) effects.  The firefighter's pregnant wife, a robust-looking Slavic girl, bids him farewell -- in the background, through a window at the end of the domestic corridor, we see a momentary flash in the distance and, then, an eerie beam of ionized atoms forming a column over the plant.  The firefighters rush to the scene and find graphite shards -- a sign that the core has exploded, suffusing the site with deadly radiation.  People who touch the graphite immediately experience terrifying burns -- the skin on their hands sloughs off.  Some of the dying workers on the scene have purplish and black burns and the firefighters all experience effects that leave them with faces and torsos looking strangely sunburned.  The local Communist party insists that all is well and, when an old apparatchik gives a patriotic speech, apparently attempting to tamp down the radiation with cant, everyone applauds.  At the Kremlin, Gorbachev is persuaded that all will be well until the film's hero, a nuclear scientist, indicates that accounts from the scene convince him that the core has been blown open and is spewing radiation into the air.  Party officials denounce the scientist (played with morose desperation by the great Jared Harris) saying that radiation detectors at the scene don't read higher than 309 roentgens -- the dose of radiation you would get in a chest x-ray.  The scientist advises them that the radiation detectors that can be hand-carried into Chernobyl all max-out at 309 roentgens (that's where the scale ends) -- and, in fact, the true radiation readings turn out to be a thousand times that number.   With a life-long party official (played the equally dour Stellan Skarsgard), the scientist flies by helicopter to the reactor still belching a plume of deadly radioactive smoke.  Skarsgard's Communist official, at first, despises the scientist as defeatist, and, even, threatens to have him pitched out of the helicopter if he continues to insist that the explosion requires the evacuation of the nearby city Pritypak.  But Skarsgard is a hard-bitten realist and he comes to understand that the catastrophe is far worse than anyone thought.  The city is evacuated and, this is the point when the film starts to flare into a sort of awful grandeur -- the show's progression to another level is encapsulated by the big crowd scenes of people getting on buses and, then, a tracking shot of an abandoned German shepherd desperately racing through the crowds of demoralized but stoic Ukrainians filing onto city buses.  There is a desperate effort to keep the melting core from contacting groundwater -- something that would poison millions of people.  At first, we see three workers up to their waists in lethal water turning off the valves that provide coolant to the plant -- these men know that they dead men walking as soon as they accept the assignment.   Three other men plunge into the darkness under the plant wearing anti-radiation suits with Geiger counters clattering out warnings -- they have to locate some kind of valve in the pitch darkness and shut it off.   This sequence is exceptionally terrifying.  Later, hundreds of coal miners are brought to the site to dig a tunnel under the core so that concrete slabs can be poured to arrest the melt-down.  The tunnel is terribly hot and, since fans would merely blow around the radiation, the miners work stark naked -- a surrealist image in which the vulnerability of the naked bodies effects the viewer in counterpoint with harrowing scenes in the Moscow hospital where the burned plant workers are literally melting into pools of oozing gore.  This sequence, very difficult to watch, involves the stoic pregnant firefighter's wife and Emily Watson, stout and dour, playing a nuclear scientist who interviews the dying men to find out what happened at the plant.  (She's the third protagonist in the film.)  The dying firefighters and plant workers are blind and their lips swollen up like balloons, bodies entirely flayed -- it's as if the men have been turned inside-out.  From time to time, the program shows tense meetings in the Kremlin.  Here the imagery is also borderline surreal (although perhaps accurate) -- the men confer in an ornate colonnaded corridor that ends with the famous and huge picture by Ilya Repin of Ivan the Terrible holding the son that he has just beaten to death in his arms (I see no evidence that the painting has ever actually been in the Kremlin.)  At the end of the third episode, the caskets containing the deliquesced bodies of the firefighters and nuclear reactor technicians are enclosed in lead sarcophaguses, lined-up in a pit and, then, buried in concrete -- we see the pour of fresh concrete gradually lapping around and, then, covering the lead tombs.

The movie has deteriorated, mildewed look -- the Soviet provincial cities are dispiriting and everyone is constantly swilling down vodka.  There is a palpable sense of doom investing the film's images -- no one looks like a movie star:  Harris, Skarsgard, and Emily Watson, all look flabby, with pasty waxen complexions.  The miners are burly with powerful shoulders and buttocks, but they are also mostly overweight.  The series is matter-of-fact, generally clinical, and open-eyed about the horrible aspects of the Soviet system -- when Emily Watson's character denounces the nurses for allowing the pregnant firefighter's wife to enter the plastic shroud where her husband is dying to hold his decomposing hand, the KGB is called and she is promptly thrown into an underground torture chamber.  She's quickly released but only because of her importance to the technical inquiry.  The various bureaucrats all have their rationales for maintaining secrecy and many of them are very reasonable-sounding and, even, well-spoken.   The KGB chieftain is sweetly eloquent -- he describes the secret police as a cozy "circle of accountability".  Although the cover-up and negligence is appalling, there are no real villains.  The film has an oddly uplifting aspect -- throughout the picture, we see people sacrificing themselves so that others can be saved.  The miners, for instance, are a tough and sardonic lot -- they can't be motivated by patriotic speeches or party-loyalty or threats of violence:  when soldiers point guns at them, they invite the troops to fire, coldly remarking that enough of them will survive to beat the soldiers to death.  But when the true stakes of their assignment is revealed -- protecting the nation's water supply from being poisoned -- they unquestioningly agree to dig the tunnel under the crumbling nuclear power plant.  While this is underway, the naked boss approaches Skarsgard and asks him if the miners "will be taken care of."  Skarsgard has previously characterized the miners as "men who work in the dark and who see everything."  "I don't know," Skarsgard tells them.  Without a word, the mine boss returns to his deadly tunnel.  Marshal Zhukov, or one of the other Red Army field marshals during World War II, used to remark before a battle that "there will be many heroes made" (meaning that some units would be sacrificed in suicidal attacks).  Chernobyl shows many heroes and the horrifying cost of this heroism. 

On several occaions