Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kutta | Hacker News Reader

As a mid-level Chernobyl geek, I found this show generally underwhelming. I admit it may hold much more interest for those who are not yet familiar with the story. But I must say, there are so many things which could have been done spectacularly, and instead we got a very pedestrian TV affair, with ample use of disaster movie and horror movie cliches and tropes, and basic bitch cinematography. Chernobyl should deserve a more flavorful adaptation if anything does. I also hate the gray-blue color grading, it would have been far more interesting to portray Pripyat as the rather vivid and young city which it was, with warmer color tones and more humane elements, instead of defaulting to dumb USSR cliches.

View on HN

Perhaps the show is more of a hit with soviet geeks than Chernobyl geeks. I was thoroughly impressed with the level of detail in set dressing and by the costume department. This individual does a much better job articulating the period accuracy than I could[1].

[1]https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1132029943297265664

The color correction reminds me of the actual film used at the time. They watched a lot of soviet movies and even adapted some cameraman angles from those.

Not sure if this is worth much, but I saw this earlier today and thought I'd leave it here. It's just an observation from a reddit user: "Cinematographer Jakob Ihre deliberately over-exposed all outdoor scenes to mimic the way the radiation during the Chernobyl disaster bleached out and destroyed the film taken at the time." [0]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TVDetails/comments/bz28hw/cinematog...

Agreed on the colors, the scenes shown focused a little but too much on the dark and grim, especially when you compare to the real footage and photographs of Pripyat from the time. It was one of the most modern and likeable cities back then. They could have shown at least few minutes of normal life just before the disaster.

Just saw the final part, they do show a little of normal life in the first minutes, props to the authors. They did such a great job with so many aspects, definitely a work of heart for many of them.

Whenever any market is heavily exploited, what once could have been "a more flavorful" creation turns into "a very pedestrian" product, systematically. Time and money go more into increasing the product's ability to be sold than its artistic value, and by an ever-increasing wide margin.

I don't disagree, but I'm curious, what could have been "done spectacularly"?

I guess the explosion, we never see it. But I think it is right they didn't do it; the effect of not seeing it is so much more true to the events and how people perceived them; I think the scenes in the control room where the operators are battling with a lack of information were a master stroke. Much better effect than some generic cgi animation could have had.

We do see the explosion in episode 5, and in my opinion it's one of the low points of the limited series. IMO the generic CGI animation you feared is exactly how it comes across.

Actually, you see the explosion in the distance at the start of the first episode from the Ignatenko's apartment.

Just saw the final part, you're right they do show it. I think they did quite a good job with that, they use it to explain what happened and smartly avoid 'cinematic' scenes.

By "spectacular" I did not primarily mean visual effects, and I think the production value of effects in the series is perfectly okay, I instead meant effective dramatization. I've only seen up to episode 3 now, but I can elaborate a bit on perhaps my biggest specific complaint so far: basically, too much fallback on disaster movie tropes, too much screen time on languid dialogues instead of trying to show much more of the vast amount of documented fascinating stories and details. It should be less about pondering the gravity of the situation with pained expressions, or grave and silent meetings with Gorbachev reminiscent of Hollywood disaster movies; instead the reality of the first few days must have been an absolute frenzy of activity, with massive organizational and logistical challenges, redirecting kilotons of material and equipment and thousands of personnel from all across the USSR. Such challenges are merely mentioned in the episodes, but we get no subjective sense of it, there is no administrative frenzy around Legasov and Scherbina. I am reminded of the Shin Godzilla movie, which is admittedly not realistic overall, but the beginning of it had a spectacular rendition of governmental and military bureaucracy kicked into panicked activity. In comparison, the Chernobyl version is rather dull and stilted. A painful issue with mainstream TV is that there is a core assumption that the audience cares mostly about personal stories but not about technical, procedural and sociological topics, and I get the impression that an HBO show cannot fundamentally break out of this box. Hence, we don't get any information about how radiation actually works and the fundamental mechanisms of its dangers and mitigation, we instead get spooky bullshit about "trillions of bullets".

So, the biggest issue was pacing, script and focus. I could also talk about photography and cinematography, which I think has been fine so far; but I would have been happier with something more creative and adventurous. I've been drawn to the topic of Chernobyl because it evokes a singular feeling of dread and awe. I'm not sure how to best evoke dread and awe; the Chernobyl TV version seemed to have succeeded to some extent, but I think that it only utilized a tiny and conventional sliver of the visual and directorial possibilities.

Having seen episode 4-5 now, I think the last episode was pretty good, and the technical breakdown was actually great.

However, episode 4 also wasted an unacceptable amount of time; the intro with the old lady and the pet hunters' parts were heavy-handed fillers, and the time should have been much better spent on expanding more on the different operations (mentioned in a pitiful few sentences in the beginning of ep 4!) and also the biorobots.

One part of my general feelings is summarized well by this article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher.... This is basically about grafting a western-style disaster movie narrative onto the story. The other part of my feelings is that they simply did not make good use of the runtime; they wasted most runtime on lackluster invented dialogues.

Thanks, that is a very strong critique of the show, there is much to agree with there. My suspicion was confirmed: the heroic characters did act a little too western-way and the true nature of the society dynamics wasn't captured as well as the visuals. I think it is hard for a westerner to understand the soviet system and people there and then, so I do not take it too hard on the authors.

I understand and partly agree. The geeky stuff was very limited and the narrative and exposition was somewhat dramatized. I am also not sure if the real characters really acted towards the state in such a brave unassailable way as depicted... Still I think the show adopts a valid viewpoint and gives a powerful and needed message about a corrupt totalitarian system. But you are right that telling the story from the point of view of organizational challenges or from a point of view of a real person putting their life in danger in taking part in the effort would be very interesting too. There are some great documents on youtube from these different points of view, e.g. the story told by Starodumov and Bordakov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com