Has anybody checked this one out yet? I’m hearing great things and it’s presently sitting at a 9.7 on IMDB.
British actors with a multitude of British regional accents throwing up and burning from radiation and a load of Commie cover-up merchants? Nahhhhh. Fock Russia. 6/10
But...at the time it was: Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic - Wikipedia And therefore, technically part if the Soviet Union.
i think it's preferable that they did it in their normal accents rather than attempt shitty Russian accents
Finally got around to watching this thanks to the suspension of the NBA season. Anyway very good show, well done, acted and really enlightens you to how big of an ecological disaster this was and how many hundreds of thousands of lives it affected. It also brings to your attention the differences in corruption between the USA and Russia. In the USA corruption of this magnitude is usually a corporate greed issue but in Russia it showed how corruption was a state issue where the only thing that mattered was Russia’s appearance of perfection and infallibility, consequences be damned. Anyway great production here as it really has the look and feel of 80’s Ukraine. 8.5/10
I gave this a go after the good reviews, but some things jarred with my recollection of what happened at the time. I looked it up and one of the main characters is a pure work of fiction - didn't exist in any way, shape or form. That would be ok except they take up loads of screen time and are credited with being pivotal and essential to the story and also seem to possess the only fully functional moral compass. This, combined with the plummy British accents, took away much of the realism for me and it dropped to a 5/6 out of 10.
Yep. Been saying this since I saw the first (and only) episode last November. Not only that, but I read the producers/writers too too many liberties with the true facts.
Well which actors weren’t real and which facts were flubbed? Because at the end they did mention in order to save time the actions of many people were sometimes concentrated into one actor. Also the facts you may be thinking that were changed could be that Russia apparently lied all these years about what actually happened and the story of the main character brought the truth to light.
I didn't want to say too much and perhaps provide a spoiler for anyone who hasn't watched it. Anyway, it was the female scientist. Everything about her including even her existence is complete fiction. After I found that out, it made it pretty hard to watch. Virtually all the other characters, their names, actions etc were accurate and, to me, it was an insult to all they endured and suffered to have a fictional "hero" inserted into the story to show them how it should have been done.
Pretty sure that at the end of the story they showed a photo of an entire work crew and mentioned how all of them actually did the work the fictional female character portrayed. Like I said she wasn’t created for creations sake, it was done to streamline the story and make it easier to create the film while simultaneously making it easier to follow the story. Lots of true stories take this type of approach.
I realise that, but this was supposed to be pretty much a ficitonalised documentary - at least that's how it was touted. There was no need at all to make her a composite of other characters at the expense of leaving out those other character's individual stories. I don't think it was for "streamlining" reasons as I found that the focus on her actually seemed to bog the story down and make it disjointed. I didn't know that she was a composite character, but her scenes seemed fake and didn't fit in with the rest of the film, so I looked it up. It just seems pretty absurd to me to have this character so emotionally charged and pivotal to the plot, when they are fictional. Once I knew that everything she said and did was invented by a scriptwriter the whole thing became pointlessly unwatchable. I mean there is the "based on a true story" type of thing, in which I expect only a loose adherence to the facts, the "inspired by a true story" which is even further removed from the facts and then there's the "this IS a true story, these events actually happened", which Chernoblyl was supposed to be. I hold the latter example to a much higher standard, so was pretty disappointed.
Also, to be fair, if I had carried on watching and not checked out whether the female scientist was fictional, I would have scored it much higher. That just took with wind out of its sails for me. And I can't recall watching anything before that revealed at the end that the main character in a "true story" was assembled from a dozen other people.
After doing my own research based on your post, I kind of agree with you that a lot of liberties appear to have been taken with this recounting of Chernobyl. I agree that it does kind of cloud my initial viewing of the film. How Accurate is Chernobyl? True Story is Far Cry from HBO Miniseries After reading over this particular link that asks and answers true or false questions about the film it is revealed that a lot of stuff was exaggerated and sometimes flat untrue. One of the things this link points out is how the number of deaths and the effects of radiation on people were exaggerated and they go on to mention this was likely done as a fear mongering tactic done by those who are against nuclear power. I find it funny that all of sudden the radiation effects seem to be downplayed too much by this article which is probably done by those who are pro nuclear reactors. It’s strange that the article claims that almost nobody who watched the Chernobyl plant from the bridge actually died like it was portrayed in the film even though the bridge came to be known as the bridge of death. They also try to downplay the deaths of the firefighters and first responders claiming very few suffered from radiation poisoning. Yet one of the firefighters who was portrayed on the show it was revealed died a truly horrible death. It said in his last few days he was defecating blood and mucus 25 times a day and puking up blood and pieces of his own internal organs. I find it hard to believe only one guy would be affected this badly and so many others wouldn’t. So while I agree the film is full of exaggerations I don’t entirely trust the accuracy of this article either. I also still think the movie gives a very strong entertaining account of the disaster even though it takes a few liberties and makes a few exaggerations as pretty much all true stories do. If you looked up how much films like The Social Network, The Pursuit of Happiness and many other true account films exaggerated, changed and straight made stuff up you’d be just as disappointed as you are with Chernobyl.
Yes, I agree. The piece you linked sound like a hatchet job and the other extreme. I don't doubt the effects of the radiation and, if anything, suspect it was much higher than official figures. Its just with a crazy high rating like that, I expected it to be told in a less manipulative way. If they hadn't shoehorned that fictional scientist into it, I doubt I'd have taken real issue with anything else.
I don’t think you can be too upset about the scientist. Most of the dialogue is made up anyway so her character doesn’t really do any harm. She’s just being used to fill the role for several other scientists. The cop who had it in for Rubin Carter in The Hurricane was completely made up as was Robert DeNiro’s character in Men Of Honor. The Social Network is nearly a complete fabrication built around a small series of origin facts. The truth is nearly all true storie films are full of falsehoods, exaggerations and fiction. I remember the beginning of The Ghost In The Darkness movie a piece of dialogue says every part of this movie is true and even that movie wasn’t 100% on the money.
