Chernobyl

Powerful and haunting. ... As bleak as it all sounds, “Chernobyl” is a riveting drama that’s full of payoffs. It’s a thoroughly researched account of an event that’s still misunderstood, and it captures the sacrifices made by the Russian people — knowingly and inadvertently — in their efforts to clean up another state-sponsored mess.

A powerful testament, and TV's best miniseries since last fall's “Escape at Dannemora.”

Even though it can be a tough watch, I found “Chernobyl” riveting. The sacrifice of those involved is inspiring, making it a mini-series you won’t want to miss.

Chernobyl is a series where you will have to remind yourself to unclench your jaw and un-tense your shoulders while watching it. It is heartbreaking and intense, and a hell of a thing to watch the day after Game of Thrones. But it’s also necessary.

The series is a vivid and detailed retelling of the cataclysm. It begins as a near-real-time thriller. ... This miniseries doesn’t have too many flourishes, and doesn’t need them. Whenever Vasily explains the statistics involved — the scope of the environmental disaster, the possibility of a meltdown seeping into the water supply — the scares are tangible.

“Chernobyl” won’t be for everyone. With constant, low-simmering intensity and an all-too-visible air of death, the vivid recreation of an unimaginable disaster can be uncomfortable to say the least. ... But Mazin and Renck do an impressive job of inviting the audience into a story filled with so many horrors.

Spare, bleak and devastating.

The esteemed actors [Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris] bring nuanced, complicated baggage to their protagonists, who are navigating a bureaucracy uninterested in failure, and so too does Emily Watson as Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear authority (and composite character) who aids Harris in his quest to contain the Chernobyl tragedy as well as deduce its underlying cause. Together, the show’s headliners lend the action gravity and humanity . ... Renck and Mazin’s haunting miniseries.

Chernobyl really is a horror movie: not just about errant technology, but also a maleficent portrait of an ideology that denies the existence of error.

Everything about the series is brilliantly tragic and horrid, narratively and artistically. But the vein of absolute horror that runs through it is the knowledge that this really happened.

Brilliantly structured and anchored by great performances from Jared Harris, Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, and more, “Chernobyl” is relentlessly bleak, but it has a remarkable cumulative power.

With its twin focuses on humankind’s ability to solve problems and its capacity for negligent destruction, Chernobyl arrives at an austere sort of grace.

It doubles as a warning about who pays the cost when the hard facts of science butt up against political agendas, whether decades ago on the other side of the Iron Curtain or here and now. Some bad decisions have half-lives that last for centuries.

In this true-life horror tale of a government refusing to acknowledge scientific fact and its ruthless demand for obedience, “Chernobyl” feels especially timely.

It’s filled with details that you may not know, all sad or horrifying. Some of these lessons are medical, telling you what radiation does to the body and the environment. Others are a philosophical gut-punch, reminding us that there’s no disaster that can’t be made worse through human pettiness. Still other times Chernobyl is unexpectedly funny, in a gallows sort of way.

HBO’s fascinating and necessarily bleak miniseries “Chernobyl” is every bit as grim as it looks — maybe even grimmer than that.

One cannot commit to watching “Chernobyl” without understanding how tough this viewing experience is. At the same time, the performances turned in by Skarsgård, Emily Watson and Jared Harris are passionate and nuanced enough to compel the tough viewers to gut out the squeamish parts. And this story is vital enough to make one hope the world has a lot of tough viewers.

Chernobyl is a thorough historical analysis, a gruesome disaster epic replete with oozing blisters and the ominous rattle of Geiger counters, and a mostly riveting drama.

Yes, watching this miniseries is a grim affair, and I mean that as a great compliment to creator, writer, and executive producer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck. There’s nothing here dulled by the decades that have passed by, no compromises to make it all more watchable. It’s a nightmare well-told.

Rather than bursting into shocking twists, writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck build a steadily creeping unease, allowing the scale of the atrocity to sink in with terrible, fitting gravity.

The fact that it really happened--and, for all of its devastation, could have been worse--makes this five-part slog of unrelieved misery even more chilling. [13-26 May 2019, p.11]

There’s precious little humor, pitch-black or otherwise. Some will call this a bit of a slog. They won’t be wrong. But this five-part autopsy has more on its mind then just recreating a snapshot of IRL horror in the name of attracting subscribers and awards-season kudos. Yes, you may raise your eyebrows regarding the pedigree of those telling this story. Yet both they and the cast innately understand how this accident was able to metastasize into something that almost decimated a continent.

An action spectacle that dominates the premiere, which airs on May 6, this sequence captures the scale of Chernobyl’s mismanagement–yet it doesn’t connect emotionally, because we don’t know anything about the workers caught in this radioactive death trap. ... At its best, however, Chernobyl demonstrates what happens when societies stop listening to science. Amid our rapidly worsening global climate crisis, it’s a critical message.

Things may improve over the coming weeks as the smoke clears, and I hope so. Chernobyl is a story that has everything, but at the moment, comrades, justice is not being done to it.

There ultimately isn't much let-up and Chernobyl is both successful for never wincing at the fallout as it gets to the truth of the issue and hampered by the relentless bleakness of the topic and its depiction. ... You should at least know what you're getting into with Chernobyl and if you can face that awful, true story, then by all means take it in. But it won't be for everyone.