Chernobyl Review of HBO: A Captivating and Dark Portrait of the Greatest Nuclear Disaster in History

Chernobyl is a tragedy. meticulous dramatization of the events that preceded and immediately followed the greatest nuclear disaster in history. Most of the conspiracy through five tense episodes concerns the superhuman efforts of confinement by brave people without whom millions would have perished. It could easily have been a bigger disaster than those brought together by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was a RBMK type reactor located near Pripyat in the Soviet Ukraine (Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine) whose heart exploded (a phenomenon that would not have been considered possible). due to several unforeseen reasons and the dispersion of large quantities of radioactive material in the region. At one point, he threatened millions of people with aerial radiation and potential contamination of groundwater. The consequences of the disaster were felt up to Norway.

Chernobyl is a high quality television, but it is by no means entertaining. Unless you are sadistic, you can not enjoy this show. It starts dark and becomes darker as it continues. Jared Harris, probably one of the most underrated actors today, plays the role of nuclear physicist Valery Legasov. He is the protagonist of the series. But he uses his influence with Deputy Prime Minister Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) to send many people to death in the containment effort. There is a sequence when a robot made in Germany is maneuvered remotely to clean the roof of the factory and it "dies" immediately even before it starts work. It is then that Legasov suggests sending men perform a task too dangerous for a machine. He puts forward a dark and subhuman term for those who are responsible for doing the job – the biorobots

It's not as if he did not realize the seriousness of what he was saying. He was not malicious towards them. He simply asked Shcherbina to order the men to move near extremely high amounts of radiation so that the Chernobyl poison would not spread and kill no more.

A little further, miners need to search a tunnel. There is a jaded leader of minors who immediately understands what this minor government official wants him to do, but does not have the guts to admit it from the outset – to die for that others can live. It is difficult to hide anything from men who have worked hard all their lives in the most difficult conditions on the planet. As Shcherbina Legasov says: "These men work in the dark. They see everything. "

The Soviet Union in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster, was an endemic empire. The incessant race to compete with the ill-advised Afghan invasion of the United States, much more economically developed, had weakened it to the maximum. It was only a matter of time before it ceased to exist. The Chernobyl incident was the first of its kind on the planet and its confinement required an unprecedented amount of resources that captivated an already bankrupt country.

(The confinement here is of two types.The first was the containment of information.The Soviet The authorities did not want the world to know the details of the disaster because, they believed, it would mean incompetence of The official position of the state, Boris told Legasov, is that the global nuclear disaster is not possible in the Soviet Union: the myth was to be perpetuated for the empire to continue. The second confinement, of course, was the control of the spread of the disaster – the pivot on which the series turns.)

Chernobyl was therefore at least one of the main causes of the end of the cold war and the radical restructuring of the world order in which the United States has become the only superpower. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, a single-party Communist state that Vladimir Lenin had built, is of the same opinion. He once said that the Chernobyl disaster "even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later".

Chernobyl has a striking narration and writing. It never lets the viewer's attention wobble, not by slowing down, but by subtly emphasizing the enormity of what we are witnessing. The role-play of Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson is reliable. This trio is talented enough to raise any material, not to mention Chernobyl.

In a way, Chernobyl is a real horror story – more scary than any scary movie or show you will see. While the demons at Chernobyl may be more routine – human incompetence, institutional decay, oppressive government, insecure, etc., they are actually real, unlike ghosts, vampires, and others. And they make killers far more ruthless and effective.

Let me conclude this review with my favorite quote from the series, a mesmerizing dialogue: "Every lie we tell engages the debt of truth. Sooner or later, this debt is paid. "

Chernobyl runs on Hotstar.