Czarnobyl

The Chernobyl series is considered by many TV series fans and journalists to be the event of the year, and they spare no praise for the work of Craig Mazin as a screenwriter and Johan Renck as a director. I am not going to ride on freely exalted enthusiasm, we have plenty of others for that. I'm not afraid to say that it is an impressive work and above-average spectacle, but that can be expected from HBO and its immense potential, where the dominant role is played by the catastrophe itself, with a great probability. Nevertheless, some aspects of the project seem somewhat schematic, exaggeratedly dramatized, played for effect, and do not correspond to the situation (the fact that I am a professional in the field also plays a role, and details that a layman easily overlooks disturb me). I have a definite opinion about some of the characters. I perceive them differently than how they are served to us by the series creators - see the character of Dyatlov - that guy was indeed an arrogant bastard, but also a fighter, and his defense and arguments were completely different. Although admiration is expressed for how perfectly the series imitates the Soviet reality, in my opinion, it is limited to visually depicting the environment, and I think that poverty and dilapidation are emphasized too much. Nuclear workers were among the privileged elite and Pripyat was a new and glamorous city of the regime. The spirit of the time, the position of the players in the story in the Soviet present, and their awareness of their own possibilities were different. Sometimes, unbelievably naive dialogues can be heard, instructive for today's, let's be openly honest, Western viewers of the series.  "Heartbreaking" sentimental scenes of the "execution" of cute puppies are also filmed for them, which also sounds quite funny to those who know. Do you have any idea how the selection of boars during the threat of swine fever, the reduction of pigeons in cities, or ducks in reservations, or the mass slaughter of herds when suspected of salivation, take place? Some elements are exaggeratedly emphasized, while others, which are much more interesting, are not explored. Generally, I have a feeling that five episodes were too few, and most of the characters with tremendous potential just passed by in the series and the viewer has no chance to develop a proper relationship with them. For me, my overall impression is still 80%, taking into account that I found my own thing in it, and a lot of what bothers me, I attribute to the effort to tailor the project to the taste of the target audience. (03.06.2019)

The first episode of the artistic reconstruction of the Chernobyl disaster is characterized by an effort to adhere to commonly known facts and it does not look cheap or lazy. Johan Renck has a sense for creating a dark, hopeless atmosphere and for choosing actors. I am looking forward to seeing Jared Harris in future episodes as well. Despite all the efforts to create a perfect illusion of the fourth block of the Chernobyl power plant at the time of the explosion, I have conflicting feelings about what I saw. Reason and the experience gathered from 23 years of practice in operating a nuclear power plant resist believing in human behavior and the reactions of the block's personnel. It's not about observing incorrect manipulations and decisions of the block supervisors, I have known those for a long time. But when one sees the staff moving through the wreckage of the building without personal dosimeters or any protective equipment, touching contaminated fittings with bare hands, breathing air full of aerosols and dust particles without respirators, it tends to shake them. A nuclear engineer, who, knowing that the reactor was blown apart by an explosion, obediently goes up to the roof to look into the open reactor core just because their superior ordered them to. It's simply something so distant from the behavior and mentality of Central Europeans that I keep asking myself how much of what I see corresponds to reality. In relation to Chernobyl, I always had different questions: for example, how is it possible that the disaster actually caused an unbelievably small number of immediate and subsequent victims? At the time of the exposure, there were 400 employees at the power plant, many of whom received extremely high doses and, contrary to expectations, lived to an old age. And this was despite the supposedly terrifying Eastern European lifestyle and stress. Furthermore, the majority of those who died from radiation-related illnesses were firefighters from outside the power plant. I attributed this to the fact that they actually behaved rationally during the accident and tried to limit their exposure. However, the first episode does something different, perhaps for dramatic effect. We will see how the creators handle the subsequent episodes. (14.05.2019)