Critical Condition: Chernobyl

Chernobyl | SoHo, 9.30 Tuesday 5.00 Friday

☆☆☆☆ “HBO’s five-part miniseries Chernobyl dramatises the accident, its aftereffects, the Soviet Union’s blurring of the facts and blackballing of those trying to release them, and the heroic efforts of those who stood up to threats ranging from radiation to bureaucratic inertia — the latter potentially as deadly as the former. It’s a lot to take on, but creator and writer Craig Mazin (previously best known for writing the Hangover sequels and having been Ted Cruz’s college roommate) and director Jordan Renck create a sustained tone of dread that gives both the disaster and its aftermath the feel of a slow-rolling nightmare.” — TV Guide.

☆☆☆☆ “The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.” — New York Times.

☆☆☆☆ “The sheer incompetence and hubris that the series reveals as the catastrophe’s ultimate culprits rather than any one particular person are more frustrating than I can possibly describe. But even if it’s viscerally painful to feel the true depths of just how badly the people in power failed, and how relentlessly they tried to deny it, that surge of furious empathy is also exactly the series’ point.” — Variety.

☆☆☆☆ ‘The explosion at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986 became one of the world’s worst man-made catastrophes: the aim of Chernobyl, a new, sensational five-part drama is to show how man made it … It’s an anatomy of a disaster that mesmerises as it appalls.” — The Telegraph.

☆☆☆☆ “The problem facing Mazin and Renck as they tell the Chernobyl story is that staggering incompetence mixed with political cover-ups results in depictions of many characters as dumb or evil while the scientists are left to explain the reckoning and there’s not a lot of subtlety in between. In their defense, this is not a subtle story.” — The Hollywood Reporter.