Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard, Jessie Buckley, Emily Watson, Paul Ritter, Adam Nagaitis, Sam Troughton, Robert Emms, Karl Davies, Con O’Neill, Adrian Rawlins, David Dencik, Barry Keoghan, Ralph Ineson, Mark Lewis Jones, Ron Cook, Donald Sumpter, Alex Fearns, Jamie Sives.
We have come a long way since the British television series Threads held the nation’s breath as it dramatized a nuclear strike on the city of Sheffield, we have come even further since the British Government decided it was too upsetting to have the public watch a drama titled The War Game and in which was then shelved for 20 years till 1985, as part of the 40th anniversary of the destruction and devastation of Hiroshima. We have travelled far, but still the fear of those times is prevalent in the minds, a race memory perhaps that we see the evil that come from such weapons of war, that such conflict brings death long after the war has been fought.
It is the war on lies that marks Chernobyl out as taking that horror to a new consistent level, not because of humanity’s naked aggression and need for belligerent conquest and supremacy but in the face of arrogance, unbridled pride and the subsequent denials when confronted with the truth, that the unquestionable can never be accused of showing weakness or fault. It is a fault, an error, arguably the most reckless of acts during the Cold War era that saw an obscure nuclear power plant in the Ukraine become the byword for man-made disasters that could and still might destroy the very fabric of existence.
A catalogue of errors, blinded faith and the concern of making the Soviet Union look weak in the face of the United States and Western Europe, a dust cloud that hangs like a spectre over an area of a country that is off limits to all but the intrepid and the willing exposers of lies.
If the thought of Nuclear war makes you shudder, then a Government’s denial and attempts at institutional cover-ups should make you weep and thanks to Johan Renck and Craig Mazin, the creeping realisation of how close most of Europe was to becoming an infertile wasteland, crawling with radioactivity, disease and death is not sanitised, nor is it frugal in its delivery. The series may take a few liberties, including the efforts of the miners, led by Alex Fearns, which proved ineffectual, but that does not matter, what you have in Chernobyl is not an exercise in proving nuclear power is dangerous, but that lies and Government practise are the cornerstone of ineptitude which leads to faults, which in turn becomes disaster, a catastrophe, a tragedy.
A powerful and immense piece of television, the moment in which an ideology was shown to be as corrupt as the menace of its enemy. We are still living with the fallout of April 1986; the lies of Chernobyl have seen to that.
Ian D. Hall