Chernobyl 1986 Parent Guide

After years of service with the Pripyat fire department, firefighter Alexey Karpushin (Danila Kozlovsky) is ready for bigger and better things: namely, a transfer to a bigger station and a nicer apartment in Kiev. But he runs into his ex, Olga (Oksana Akinshina), and discovers that he has a child, Alex (Pyotr Tereshchenko) he has never known. While he’s still coming to terms with that bombshell, a catastrophic failure at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant triggers a massive explosion, widespread fire, and dangerous radiation leaks. Alexey soon finds himself in the middle of the disaster, working furiously with his fellow firefighters to try and prevent worse disasters. But worse disasters are coming unless people can find the courage to volunteer to do work which will almost certainly kill them.

I was expecting this movie to be state-sponsored propaganda designed to deflect blame from Russian authorities and reactor officials, which it is, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so unbelievably lazy. One line that really stands out comes near the end of the film as our plot-armored hero asks who was responsible for the disaster. The reply to this critical question is simply, “Does it really matter?” Now, I found that incredibly infuriating and transparently dishonest. Of course it matters – the film’s backers, which includes the Russian state atomic agency Rosatom, would just prefer that you didn’t think about it. What this most reminds me of is Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, another piece of decades-late propaganda, designed to avoid difficult conversations about responsibility and causality, opting instead to spoon feed viewers a bizarre romance subplot.

Not surprisingly, this piece of clumsy propaganda goes out of its way to try and downplay and ignore the severity of what actually happened on April 26, 1986, instead focusing on small and frequently fictionalized details. Wouldn’t you like to know how or why the reactor failed so spectacularly? Well, instead of even mentioning the criminal incompetence during testing which led to an open-air reactor meltdown which threatened to irradiate most of Europe, let’s focus on the bizarre dynamics between one firefighter and his ex. Brilliant choice.

This film’s primary content concerns are result the extreme radiation exposure and environmental hazards which cause some gruesome injuries. The most disturbing of these are very nasty radiation burns, but individuals are also scalded by high-pressure steam and injured by pieces of the collapsing structure. There’s hardly any profanity and no real sexual content to speak of, which surprised me until I remembered that the point of propaganda is to be easily accessible by a broad audience.

Frankly, I wouldn’t watch Chernobyl 1986 under any circumstances. It’s a cheap piece of Russian government spin, built on the backs of hardworking and self-sacrificing volunteers who went above and beyond to save others. If you want to gain appreciation for those who actually made those decisions and those sacrifices, watch HBO’s superb miniseries Chernobyl. This film is just a tawdry monument built on the lead-lined graves of actual heroes.