zombe on 11/6/2019 at 19:27
Scanned the review diagonally ( i don't live in a skyscraper :P ) - seems to have some typical wokeyness (ex: "The fact of the matter is, if he didn't know how it worked, he would never have had a lab."). However, to an extent, i am fine just ignoring that kind of nonsense. Writing big real world foregin events into couple of hours is rather difficult without something going wonky.
Dema, your elevator pitch skills are admirable. That first section alone was very helpful.
Ok. I'll give the show a go - as soon as i can.
Starker on 11/6/2019 at 23:21
I watched the first episode and it really is amazingly authentic to the degree that I was having flashbacks constantly. And what's even more mindblowing is that this is completely unexpected from a Western TV show, which would usually get it cartoonishly wrong to the degree of bears in fur hats drinking vodka out of the bottle and playing the balalaika. This isn't authentic enough for just a Western movie, it would be good enough for a Soviet movie made in the 80s and filmed on location.
As for the drama part, it's also very good. The first episode was thick with dramatic irony as you watch the events unfolding and people scrambling to make sense of the situation. I think they did a fairly good job in letting actions and events speak for themselves. The only thing that I thought was too much over the top was a couple of people randomly starting to bleed though their skin. Radiation is not a magic death ray.
rachel on 11/6/2019 at 23:23
Found this while looking up for more info... An interview of Anatoly Dyatlov, who was in charge that day. I honestly didn't feel like it was one hour long, but there it is.
[video=youtube_share;N8__v9EswN4]https://youtu.be/N8__v9EswN4[/video]
No doubt HBO characterized its characters in a classic villains/bad guys fashion for narrative reasons and there was more to the real story than the show. It is, after all, a show and not a documentary, and they make no pretense otherwise. But for all his flaws, real or imagined, Dyatlov ultimately comes across as a pretty tragic figure. I can't imagine what it must be like to live with the knowledge you're responsible for a disaster of this magnitude...
Quote Posted by Starker
This isn't authentic enough for just a Western movie, it would be good enough for a Soviet movie made in the 80s and filmed on location.
Apparently they filmed at a power plant in Lithuania that was pretty much a copy of the Chernobyl plant. It's actually where the design flaw regarding the graphite was found in the first place.
Starker on 12/6/2019 at 06:38
Anyway, I continue to be impressed by the show. It's nearly unbelievable how they not only captured the physical material aspects of Soviet life, but also the interpersonal relationships and especially how the society and the state were interacting with each other. There really was an active rumour mill and many people learned to take precautions by having their neighbours warn them about it while the state did their best to suppress and discredit.
Also, one thing that they got absolutely right (and something that many shows portraying Soviet life miss) was the sheer chutzpah exhibited by certain characters: if you wanted to get ahead in the life, you had to have a certain amount of impudence. For example, if you wanted to get somewhere you weren't allowed to be, you just lied to get in or bribed someone or went there anyway and played stupid if you were caught.
If you want to get a glimpse of the Soviet mentality and the machinery at work, Adam Curtis has an excellent hour-long documentary that I thought captured it really well. It's called The Engineer's Plot and it's episode 1 of the series Pandora's Box.
I thought she had a point at first, but now having watched two episodes of the series, I don't agree with her criticisms at all. The things that she saw as follies, I thought were depicted entirely plausibly in the show, even accurately. Some of the apparatchiks really were that stupid and boorish and boastful and not all scientists were subservient to the regime. People like Shcherbyna and Legasov and Khomyuk really did exist. There were even people like Sakharov who went far beyond what the apparently unbelievably rebellious scientists in the show did. As for the scene with Shcherbyna and Legasov in the helicopter, he is just trying to intimidate someone who he sees as an annoying pencil-pusher who is giving him lip. He's not seriously suggesting he will have Legasov executed when he says he'll throw him out of the helicopter, he is simply getting some payback for Legasov's dismissive attitude when he said that a nuclear reactor is too complex to understand for someone like Shcherbyna. This is a development of the relationship between these characters, not a comment on how the Soviet power structure worked.
Yes, of course the series takes some liberties. It dramatises the events and fictionalises some characters and facts. For example,
there's an helicopter crash in the show that didn't happen until way later in real life, but it did pretty much happen the way it was depicted (the helicopter clipped a crane cable). But I found that at the core if it, it stays remarkably accurate to the spirit of things and the events that happened. And no, it's not a documentary or even pretending to be one. It's simply a historical drama with an extraordinary attention to detail.
zombe on 12/6/2019 at 19:09
Managed to watch the first episode very late yesterday.
The sets. The props. Good damn! Really impressed with that. And the constant smoking x_x - boy was that shit annoyingly popular back then (kind of what made me a non-smoker). The show definitely brings back some memories.
Many characters are immediately recognizable so far. Very promising.
Liked, more than i expected, the depiction of disbelief from Anatoly. Usually he is depicted as a complete flailing retard - now there were some well timed subtle "triggers" for him to miss what is actually going on. Reminded me (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs) ("Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?" by Nickolas Means). Events there, with the biases from knowing the outcome, can also make one see the people in charge as idiots.
Still felt a bit overplayed - but way better than the usual crap.
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raph: thanks for sharing - i will leave that till later.
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Completely off topic, but while browsing the twitter link from ZB i noticed this:
Quote:
The initial "Wait a minute, why are kids going to school on a Saturday?" response quickly gave way to "Shit, that's right! We didn't switch to the 5-day week until 1989!"
Wait what? I have no memory of this. Had to ask my parents ... turns out there indeed was switch between 1988 and 1989. I do remember a reform at that time, because it caused some inconvenience to me, but i have no memory of the week length change that accompanied it. Bizarre.
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Next episode hopefully ... in a few hours.
Starker on 12/6/2019 at 19:45
Third episode done and I still can't get over how well done and authentic everything is. The scenes in the hospital are spot on. The hospitals really were that squalid (well, some more than others) and you really did have to bribe people (especially the doctors).
Yes, this guy gets it! As he says:
Quote:
When I watched “Chernobyl” — and 1986 was a very memorable year for me, and I recall all these events very well — I was shocked by how little there was to find fault with. And this applies not just to the interiors, the clothes, and so on. It’s clear that the people behind this show worked very seriously to bring it all together, and it’s amazing how authentic the characters feel, in terms of Soviet mentality, as far as is possible for Western screenwriters. It's my understanding that the person who wrote this is an American without any ties to Russia, so it’s surprising how believable the show’s characters are and how convincing their behavior is.
That's the perfect word to describe how I've felt about the series: not just surprised but completely and utterly shocked. In one of the scenes there's a wall rug hanging on a clothesline. I had the exact same soviet mass-produced rug on the wall next to my bed and I would see it every time I went to sleep. It's like they made the series using things from my life and it really feels like time travel half of the time.
zombe on 13/6/2019 at 09:47
Finished watching it.
It deteriorated in the middle to final parts a bit (idiotic nonsense physics + unnecessarily excessive drama exploitation).
However - the good parts still outweight the bad. So, it was a good show in my book (just ignore/skip the bullshit).
Starker on 14/6/2019 at 05:49
Just finished watching the last two episodes. Wow, what a ride. It's impressive in many ways, but I think the best part is how understated everything is. Mostly you're just shown the people, their actions, and the conditions they are in, and you have to connect the dots yourself. And I think that the authenticity is very helpful to viewers who don't have the cultural knowledge to understand the background everything. An intelligent viewer will consciously or unconsciously pick up on all the things that are not stated outright. One look around the liquidators' camp tells you more than a long expose about their living conditions and the nature of their work. Which of course was not all about the heroic things that got made into near myths later. And they don't need to tell you that. They just put the biorobots side by side with the animal control guys and you get the picture.
It also helps that they stay very close to the actual events, as they happened. Of course there's some artistic license taken for dramatic purposes, but to my surprise I actually found that some of the things that sounded way over the top were portrayed nearly verbatim in some cases. For example, while a few opinion articles have said it's very unlikely that someone would have threatened to have their subordinates shot, because executions had largely stopped at that point, there's this bit I found in the book Voices from Chernobyl (which the show's writers also heavily relied on):
Quote:
One guy, I think he was from Leningrad, began to protest. They told him they'd drag him before a military tribunal. The commander said exactly that before the troops: 'You'll go to jail or be shot.'
And the drama they do use, they use incredibly well. And they have just the right actors for it -- not some Hollywood stars, but people who actually plausibly look the part. And they made the absolutely right decision to have them speak plain English instead of horribly mangled Russian or some caricature of a Russian accent. It's so well researched and so well executed that it's no wonder it got so much praise. I went in there expecting another overhyped show with more flash than substance, but it actually ended up being an education and a humbling experience for me. I learned about things I never gave much thought about before. And of course it's very relevant in this day and age. Not just because of the climate crisis that still gets denied in face of overwhelming evidence, but also because of the general war on truth that's going on right now.
Finally, one brilliant thing about it was how they built up the hero narrative and then at the very end
exposed that it was lies all along -- (the character of) Legasov wasn't a hero, he was just another scientist toeing the party line, like so many others. And that was crucial to drive home the point that it was never about any one person. Anyone who was high enough in the system had to be compromised to some extent and anyone with integrity never rose high enough in the system. What mattered was that the system was rotten to the core. And these are the things that always happen when personal interests and ideology are put above everything else.Now onto listening to the Chernobyl podcast about making of the show: (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUeHPCYtWYQ&list=PLO79iP69FaZPKaMDoSPAtGdoa3wd3lp9n)
zombe on 14/6/2019 at 19:45
Thanks for sharing - would have probably missed thous even existed.