"Chernobyl" is a 5-episode miniseries by HBO, chronicling the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its aftermath. It displays the calamity of the incident and just how devastating it is not only for the civilians, but the heroes who helped to diffuse the situation. It also delves into the tricky framework of the politics within the Soviet Union, questioning the cost of secrets.
The visual effects are amazing. The disaster looked devastating and when we get a glimpse of what happened to the victims, it is just disturbing to watch. It does well to highlight just the devastation that the nuclear disaster caused and while I knew it was bad, I never knew it was this horrifying. I love that the series didn't shy away from showing gruesome imagery and instead going bold to display just the horrors of the disaster in its entirety.
The characters are also very well-written. We have Jared Harris as Valery Legasov, the physicist from the Kurchatov Institute brought in to solve the problem. We have Stellan Skarsgård as Boris Shcherbina, a politician charged with the task of handling the disaster. These two actors gave incredible performances and within the span of just five episodes, I learned a lot about these characters because they were very well-written. Their motivations, their backgrounds, their struggles, their ideals. These are two names that I had never heard before, which highlights just the amount of secrecy that shrouds this operation within the Soviet Union, and by the end of the movie, I felt I know these two people more from reading their Wikipedia pages. There are bound to be some historical inaccuracies, but nevermind that.
The series starts with a bang with the explosion, and then ramps up the tension with dealing in the aftermath, and settles to a subtle, smaller-scale, yet equally tense finale. There is just so much suspense throughout the series and you can't help but feel for the heroic sacrifices of everyone who participated in helping deal with the disaster. The musical score is superb and it owes it to its simplicity, no large explosive choruses but powerfully chilling. One of my favorite ones is the sound of the dossimeter just becoming more of a frenzy, and this just elevates the tension level.
It's five episodes, it's succinct, but it packs a punch. It is one of the best, if not the best, TV series I have ever watched.
The visual effects are amazing. The disaster looked devastating and when we get a glimpse of what happened to the victims, it is just disturbing to watch. It does well to highlight just the devastation that the nuclear disaster caused and while I knew it was bad, I never knew it was this horrifying. I love that the series didn't shy away from showing gruesome imagery and instead going bold to display just the horrors of the disaster in its entirety.
The characters are also very well-written. We have Jared Harris as Valery Legasov, the physicist from the Kurchatov Institute brought in to solve the problem. We have Stellan Skarsgård as Boris Shcherbina, a politician charged with the task of handling the disaster. These two actors gave incredible performances and within the span of just five episodes, I learned a lot about these characters because they were very well-written. Their motivations, their backgrounds, their struggles, their ideals. These are two names that I had never heard before, which highlights just the amount of secrecy that shrouds this operation within the Soviet Union, and by the end of the movie, I felt I know these two people more from reading their Wikipedia pages. There are bound to be some historical inaccuracies, but nevermind that.
The series starts with a bang with the explosion, and then ramps up the tension with dealing in the aftermath, and settles to a subtle, smaller-scale, yet equally tense finale. There is just so much suspense throughout the series and you can't help but feel for the heroic sacrifices of everyone who participated in helping deal with the disaster. The musical score is superb and it owes it to its simplicity, no large explosive choruses but powerfully chilling. One of my favorite ones is the sound of the dossimeter just becoming more of a frenzy, and this just elevates the tension level.
It's five episodes, it's succinct, but it packs a punch. It is one of the best, if not the best, TV series I have ever watched.