Antinuclear

Apocalyptic mini-series Chernobyl is the year’s unlikely TV hit,  SMH, By Craig Mathieson, June 11, 2019 “…… Chernobyl, a grimly compelling series screening weekly on Foxtel with all five episodes streaming online, is particularly incisive. By using events in 1986, set under a totalitarian regime that subsequently collapsed into the dustbin of history, the show is able to comment on 2019…..

“I prefer my opinion to yours,” a local party boss dismissively tells Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a nuclear physicist who tries to raise the alarm about how serious the accident is. Chernobyl is an indictment on the official fictions of Russia’s one party communist state, a system of crippling shortcuts and absurd obeisance to power, but the blank and bureaucratic system has a familiar feel. One dissenter is threatened not with the bullet but professional obliteration, so that there’s no trace of their life’s work. That’s only more relevant now.

Written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the drama begins in the moments after the devastating eruption, unfolding as a ticking clock clean-up thriller, a mystery about the cause of the accident, and a study of individuals confronting the power that has nurtured them. Both nuclear scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and government minister Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard) are insiders, lying about the risk to first responders or asking miners to risk life-threatening  contamination to help prevent a complete nuclear meltdown.

Like all historic recreations it changes details and amalgamates characters into fictionalised representations such as Watson’s Khomyuk, but it succeeds through a dry tone that has the bitterest of aftertaste. It mostly doesn’t allow for sentimentality: when the mining crew foreman asks Shcherbina if his men will be looked after properly for their sacrifice, the political party boss replies “I don’t know” and the phlegmatic miner is actually satisfied. It’s a dreadful answer, but for once he’s been told the truth.

People are evacuated from an Exclusion Zone, animals are shot, and the very earth itself is dug up for 100 square kilometres to be buried elsewhere. The lessons are terrible but instructive: stemming the damage is not the same as fixing the problem. Chernobyl has been an unlikely success with viewers, growing its American audience with each episode and becoming the top-rated show on the website IMDb.com. Its appeal is readily apparent. It reflects our present and gives form to our inexplicable future.https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/apocalyptic-mini-series-chernobyl-is-exploding-on-screens-20190610-p51w8v.html