Chernobyl Diaries

Let’s be honest, Chernobyl Diaries is about place more than anything else. Sure the characters on the screen perhaps provoke annoyance, aggravation, eye-rolling, sighs, grated-nerves, and even apathy, but where they find themselves under attack by “dark forces” is quite heavy in foreboding and Chernobyl’s unfortunate, tragic history allows the filmmakers to at the very least milk the reminder of what once was and now is.
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Chris (Jesse McCartney) is the only cautious one among his group of four. Chris’ girlfriend, Natalie (Olivia Taylor Dudley), who knows of Chris’ brother, Paul’s (Jonathan Sadowski) impulsiveness and bouts of immaturity (he’s in Kiev, with a mother sick with worry state-side), and her buddy, Amanda (Devin Kelley) agree that it’d be cool to tour Chernobyl--with Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), a local as their guide--a locale infamous for being abandoned overnight thanks to the nearby nuclear factory’s nuclear fallout. Everything about this tour seems doomed; I think there’s this feeling of doom that hovers over them the moment Chernobyl is brought up by Paul to the group. Chris is right in that they should just go, as planned, to Moscow, but he’s overruled by the other three so onward to Chernobyl. Of course, basic plotting dictates that these four must find themselves in Chernobyl in order for the horror to surround and eventually surmount them. Chris shows Paul a ring he plans to place on Natalie’s finger with the accompanying proposal for marriage, which further implies he’s doomed to perhaps kick the bucket first...well after Uri (he is the only one among them that knows the place, so he's obviously the one to be annihilated by "them"). In a film like this, if you have any plans for the future, you’re ass is grass. Chris is a good guy. He may be the younger brother, but he is more responsible than Paul, but because he doesn’t put his foot down against the idea of going to Chernobyl, he can’t escape scrutiny. Natalie, you’d think, would also know better than to follow one of Paul’s whims...I'm pretty sure Chris has well informed her of Paul's behavior. Moscow was a definitive plan, and the safe option, but Paul is “throw caution to the wind”, unpredictable, and danger-seeking so he is the one to blame for whipping up this exciting destination for the four of them, not taking into account the harm that might befall them.

 

The score is slight but layers the film with a feeling that these characters are in serious trouble. A couple (newly formed, one an Aussie, the other a “Viking”) take this “extreme tour” with the four and guide Uri. What I think this score does do is paint that picture of piano held overhead by a rope that could snap real soon, or that’s what I equate it to anyway. Pripyat, Ukraine, is the place that Uri is to take them to, but armed guards at the opening of the town inform him that the van can’t pass due to “maintenance tasks”. The score had told us as the group look out their windows seemingly excited about their trip that the comforts of safety were being left behind and forwarding ahead on their present path spelled catastrophic events awaiting them. When Paul persists that Uri get them to Pripyat, when the guards told them to turn around and go back where they came from, this further builds that knowing danger…this is a sign to not partake on their course. Once Uri takes his “short cut” (a no-no in horror), it is the equivalent of taking the advice of a strange, creepy individual and going off the highway and on the dirt/gravel side road…only bad will come of this.

Seeing this on the small screen for the first time since I watched it in the theater in 2012, it has lost some of its impact. Pripyat doesn’t seem as all-encompassing, but movies like these do seem to overall play better on the small screen rather than in the theater a good deal of the time (the Paranormal Activity films such an example). I think getting that “full view” of the city enlarged on a theater screen kind of places us there so we can feel a bit of the same dread as the characters. But the style of these kinds of films (very much in the television style of The Office or Modern Family), where filmmakers can accomplish a lot on the cheap move like cars on the Autobahn and rarely hold steady. Digital allows for cutting corners and inexpensive features, but I just prefer film and always will…Quentin Tarantino and I certainly agree on that point. But this film, with its roving camera that encircles the city from all angles, establishes place well, but I would have preferred shots held for longer than two/three seconds. I don’t feel like I’m experiencing the place as much as getting a sneak peek all around it without taking it all in. Maybe that hurts Chernobyl Diaries whereas Paranormal Activity and its ilk are about what happens within the walls and outskirts of a particular home (or homes dealing with the characters associated with the demon); the editing process of films like CD are what I consider ADD. No time seems viable for an extended shot that gives us a real feel of where the characters are. PA films do provide that. I watch Zero Dark Thirty and / or even Bourne Supremacy and the style incorporated is the immediacy of each and every moment, and how frenetic pace is necessary because staying still very long means capture or death. But CD doesn’t face that until nighttime in Pripyat, so the camera and editing are about saving cash and not wasting time. I think the style hurts CD somewhat.

We do get the oohs and aahs of the city just the same—its abandonment calls on what Uri claims is nature taking  back its turf, and dismissing man (or we are led to believe, at first) from it—and how it does look like time and nature have eroded progress and acquired the city and surroundings for their own use. A city in disrepair and overcome by 25 years of radiation, Nuclear power plant 4 vaporized after a systems failure leading to 50,000 citizens forced from their homes, and all that is left is the ruins of what once was an occupied place. This seems to be a literal ghost city.

Markers exist of nature’s mutation (radiation for 25 years would dictate metamorphosis of some sort if anything lived within it) or existence. The mutated shark-teethed fish and the bear that emerges in an apartment complex Uri allowed his tourists to visit are clear signs of nature and its dangers to mankind. But radiation hasn’t just mutated animal as we will soon learn as the tourists and their guide do.

The mere idea of nocturnal flesh-eating predators that are human in basic biology (well, somewhat) but primal and savage, cannibalistic and ferocious is the stuff of nightmares. This  certainly isn’t a good place to be if you are stranded in their city. I read about how critics say this isn’t the least bit suspenseful finding that to be nonsense. The premise alone is rather scary because once Uri leaves the picture, and Chris is badly hurt by a flesh wound to the leg and can’t walk (the van absent an important part needed to drive out of the city, wires seemingly chewed), an exit strategy is evasive. Especially disconcerting is when a car graveyard has a large bus (with bullet holes exiting out from the inside towards something outside) that proves that previously others experienced a similar situation they now endure. A scene early in the film, prior to arriving to Pripyat, had Uri showing the group a lake. The lake shows, after the group leaves, mutated fish swimming about. Yeah, that was foretelling a scene of obvious danger, eluding to members of the group perhaps potentially suffering attack after fall into it.

 

 

When members of the group go off to find a part for the van, they return to find it turned over, with the windows gone. A video recording provides further evidence of the nocturnal savages’ danger to them all, although visual illustration of what they look like is still kept from us. The disadvantage of night and lack of knowledge in their location are milked by the filmmakers substantially. Again, the idea that this film is not suspenseful escapes me. Have nocturnal human cannibalistic savages coming at you in the dead of night and then tell me it isn’t all that scary.

As you expect, the numbers start to dwindle a little at a time as survivors realize that a whole underground society exists, much to their misfortune. Ultimately, the only escape route that seems to exist is towards high levels of radioactivity. CD keeps the survivors running as members are pulled away into the dark by these cannibals with our imaginations providing the gory details of them becoming lunch meat to get caught in the teeth of these savages while they chow down. The highly radioactive power plant where Paul and Amanda flee into slowly sickens and burns them. They must escape but the revelation that Ukrainian military and scientists know of the existence of the mutant community, keeping them a secret, and not allowing anyone who might learn of the cannibals to go free is the hopeless climax that tells us never to go anywhere near Pripyat. This doesn’t exactly help the Ukrainian tourist trade, now does it? Word to the wise: if soldiers are guarding the entrance of a city, stay the fuck away from it.