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HBO's Chernobyl |OT| Do you taste something metallic?
- Thread starter Wrexis
- Start date
I'm kind of bothered about the divers, tbh. The show makes it looks like a poorly-organized last ditch effort where three men were sent to die, ill-prepared, practically swimming in the radioactive water, lost in the dark with no clue where to go.
But apparently it was more like, the firemen tried pumping the water out but it was going too slow, so three plant workers who knew the area volunteered to go open the necessary valves to drain the basement for no extra reward. By that time the water was only knee-deep. Also it was light out, and a team previously had surveyed the plant with Geiger counters so they had some clue of the radiation levels they were going to find. Since everything was labeled and the workers knew exactly where they were going, it was maybe more so perilous than genuinely terrifying, even if we take the flashlights dying account as fact.
Also apparently that didn't even drain the pool fast enough, so the fire department continued pumping out the water and only then did they finally get it to empty. I bring this up because one of the divers has expressed his dismay at the level of dramatization around this so-called "suicide mission". In reality they knew it had to be done, so they did it. I don't think they expected to die in the process to begin with, although I do imagine it was a possibility they acknowledged.
But apparently it was more like, the firemen tried pumping the water out but it was going too slow, so three plant workers who knew the area volunteered to go open the necessary valves to drain the basement for no extra reward. By that time the water was only knee-deep. Also it was light out, and a team previously had surveyed the plant with Geiger counters so they had some clue of the radiation levels they were going to find. Since everything was labeled and the workers knew exactly where they were going, it was maybe more so perilous than genuinely terrifying, even if we take the flashlights dying account as fact.
Also apparently that didn't even drain the pool fast enough, so the fire department continued pumping out the water and only then did they finally get it to empty. I bring this up because one of the divers has expressed his dismay at the level of dramatization around this so-called "suicide mission". In reality they knew it had to be done, so they did it. I don't think they expected to die in the process to begin with, although I do imagine it was a possibility they acknowledged.
I like that people who know more write in this thread about what really happened about this and that, but I actually prefer that they keep this level of dramatisation because I watch the series as an entertainment piece. And my friends wouldn't be interested either to watch real documentaries about Chernobyl disaster, so this dramatic retelling is a good compromise. To have this thread and the series, it's a win win.
Exactly and as the podcast says they are being as faithful to the event as they feel they could.
Overdramatic historical fiction is stuff like Titanic to me. Which is hyper obsessed with object and material accuracy, but entirely fabricated plot lines and characters.
This takes some liberties, for sure, and people should be aware of those liberties, but has not veered into fantasy, imo.
But it is clearly a dramatization and not a historical documentary.
This takes some liberties, for sure, and people should be aware of those liberties, but has not veered into fantasy, imo.
But it is clearly a dramatization and not a historical documentary.
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It's almost like they planned it that way
I finally checked out episode 1 last night and whew, that was intense to watch right before bed. I'll probably check out #2 tonight.
But isn't that exactly what they wanted?
To be serious, I'm keeping my Sky subscription a little longer as well because of Chernobyl. But sometimes it feels bad to give them exactly what they want lol.
There are still people who think they dropped dead shortly after doing their jobs, but two of them are still alive today!!
So much misinformation out there, I know I read something a couple of days ago saying all three died within weeks. But you're right, finding better sources, two of them were still living as of 2015.
You could ditch Sky and have Now TV that has all the HBO shows?
But why? Serious question. I don't know anything about Now TV. I'm just having the Sky Subscription for GoT and keep it a little longer for Chernobyl. And when Chernobyl is done I'll quit Sky. What's this Now TV making better than Sky?
Sky own Now. Now is non subscription, you pay for a month at a time, it's pretty cheap for a one month entertainment pass, £5 or something
Yeah I looked that up too, and the third only died in 2005.
Partly comes from just how much disinformation and concealment the USSR did.
I'm curious if E3 will show them surviving or not, will demonstrate what sources they used (which I can probably look up).
Wasn't able to dig up any info quickly on if the steam explosion would have been as catastrophic on a geographic level as the show said. I mean it may not have been as awful but not due to dramatization in the show but just reflecting how much guessing they were doing on some aspects.
I see where the problem lies. Actually I don't have a Sky subscription. I have a sky ticket which costs 9.99€ for one month and I can cancel it at any time. I used the word subscription falsely. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
And because of Chernobyl I'll have the sky ticket for June as well, as the last episode will come out in June.
The way this show builds tension is unbelievable. My wife and I usually don't get a chance to watch anything until after the kids are in bed, and we usually break halfway through to make a snack or something. We just CAN'T stop this show. It's palpable. It's brilliant.
And to think this is from the guy that wrote The Hangover.
And to think this is from the guy that wrote The Hangover.
How though, wouldn't the radiation have been off the charts in that water to the point they'd have got ARS?
Yeah it's crazy. I just chalk it up to "radiation affects different people differently sometimes". Same reason why so many firefighters, Akimov, and Sitnikov died, but the guy holding the reactor door open (shown in ep1) and these 3 managed to live.
If you are interested in more material along these lines, Threads is very powerful. It's a film for TV from the 80's, basically the British The Day After, and is even more grim. Fair warning, it is very unsettling, and it really drives its point home.
Can be streamed on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/threads_201712
Can be streamed on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/threads_201712
Same here, man. The music and atmosphere are so eerie. This is damn good so far, it's an hour long and it flies by so quickly too.
The characters are a bit much at points, like everyone there's a Metal Gear Villain.
I am glad this thread is picking up traction. Its probably the best thing on TV right now.
Honestly couldnt give 2 shits about perfect historical accuracy.
Honestly couldnt give 2 shits about perfect historical accuracy.
For real, give this entire production team the budget and time to do whatever they want.
The briefing of what could have happened was chilling.
(No hate, I just find it too amusing to ignore. I realize they are different things.)
The issue with the lack of realism is that because everything is so well done (i.e., has the veneer of "realism"), people are going to assume it is realistic or completely true to events. So far it looks like it's going to feed into the historical hysteria over the risks of nuclear power.
It's not. The real threat was a steam or hydrogen explosion that could have destroyed or damaged the other reactors at the plant, causing catastrophic failures of the other reactors. The "megaton" explosion claim apparently came from some crank Russian physicist who has been widely discredited.
An actual, honest-to-god nuclear explosion is basically impossible at a nuclear powerplant. For one, bombs take much more highly enriched fuel, for two, you have to smash the fissible material together really fast to make it explode meaningfully. Even then to get a megaton (millions of tons of TNT equivalent) explosion as cited in the show, you need a thermonuclear bomb, which has a whole other set of material/engineering needs to make work.
The thing is, I wouldn't trust it to be realistic. Like, the effects of acute radiation syndrome usually take longer than what's shown, but it depends on the dose.
The "we'll be dead in 5 years" line is totally bogus. Of the 134 people who were hospitalized for radiation sickness (i.e., obviously really super fucked up), 28 died within a year, but only 14 of the others died of cancer-related deaths in the next ten years (source, table 6).
It's not. The real threat was a steam or hydrogen explosion that could have destroyed or damaged the other reactors at the plant, causing catastrophic failures of the other reactors. The "megaton" explosion claim apparently came from some crank Russian physicist who has been widely discredited.
An actual, honest-to-god nuclear explosion is basically impossible at a nuclear powerplant. For one, bombs take much more highly enriched fuel, for two, you have to smash the fissible material together really fast to make it explode meaningfully. Even then to get a megaton (millions of tons of TNT equivalent) explosion as cited in the show, you need a thermonuclear bomb, which has a whole other set of material/engineering needs to make work.
The thing is, I wouldn't trust it to be realistic. Like, the effects of acute radiation syndrome usually take longer than what's shown, but it depends on the dose.
The "we'll be dead in 5 years" line is totally bogus. Of the 134 people who were hospitalized for radiation sickness (i.e., obviously really super fucked up), 28 died within a year, but only 14 of the others died of cancer-related deaths in the next ten years (source, table 6).
Schindler's List has incredibly well done effective and evocative realism and also plenty of historical inaccuracy. Look them up. Doesn't make it any lesser of a work or a poor representation of the Holocaust.
Henry V was written 100 years after the fact and is loaded with assumptions. It is still a landmark work of Western civilization.
Boardwalk Empire, The Tudors, The Last Kingdom.. Nothing here is going to pass this purity test of absolute historical accuracy. This is why we call them dramas and not documentaries. You have nobody to blame but yourself if you believe this is an educational course on what actually happened down to every spoken word.
And despite all that, this is still quite true to the events. A character making a mistake predicting how long it would take people to die is perfectly fine. Doctors can misdiagnose patient life expectancy and that is with a detailed understanding of their physiology.
Henry V was written 100 years after the fact and is loaded with assumptions. It is still a landmark work of Western civilization.
Boardwalk Empire, The Tudors, The Last Kingdom.. Nothing here is going to pass this purity test of absolute historical accuracy. This is why we call them dramas and not documentaries. You have nobody to blame but yourself if you believe this is an educational course on what actually happened down to every spoken word.
And despite all that, this is still quite true to the events. A character making a mistake predicting how long it would take people to die is perfectly fine. Doctors can misdiagnose patient life expectancy and that is with a detailed understanding of their physiology.
You can't blame them, it is excellently executed and produced. Hard to watch it without feelings.
Yes, the show combines hundreds of people into one character. But that character still represents what happened.
This show is hardly a Michael Bay production.
There are too many 'experts' in this thread.
Back on-topic, I totally didn't recognize Stellan Skarsgård.. wow. What a performance!
Consensus seems to be that an explosion in the megatons would be absurd (where would that amount of energy even come from?) but considering how bad the initial rupture was, a second and potentially larger steam explosion would have been no picnic even if it didn't kill the continent.
I'm waiting for Watchmen as well, but the trailer is giving me mixed vibes
Yeah, it's a bit weird the writer put so much emphasis on the size of the blast. The whole series is about how a relatively small scale explosion (the plant's command room barely noticed the catastrophic event) threatens an entire country, not sure why we needed the extra drama to understand the threat escalation by just talking about radiation spread and persistence.
Just started watching it with my wife, and I'm honestly disappointed by the "all British accents"....mainly because of the reasoning behind it by the creators ("We think that a Ukranian accent would sound silly and it would distract the audience"), honestly to me the British accents are more distracting than anything and as an Eastern European it's a little bit insulting to hear that....good show though.
i think you didn't really capture what he was said. he said that having actors do accents would cause a distraction - not that ukranian accents themselves would. accents have a very fine line between acting and parody and he didn't want to risk it. so he didn't bother.
entirely up to you if you agree but wanted to clarify the reasoning.
The primary reason they gave in the podcast was that they wanted to help the actors get closer to the truth of the characters rather than waste a lot of effort getting an accent right. I'm not an actor so I can't judge how much merit that argument holds. I liked this choice in Death of Stalin and it works here too.
Except that isn't the reason for the actors using their own accents. It's so the actors play the part instead of playing the accent.
Ok, I understand that, but why not cast Ukrainian actors to either do the show with genuine Ukrainian English accents or do the show in Ukrainian? It's not like there are no Ukrainian actors....I don't know, to me it's distracting and it kinda pulls me out of the show.
Yeah, why did they do Black Panther in a different accent than the one the actors had in real life? It's not really a strong counter argument, I'm pretty sure the actors could've pulled it off without sounding "silly" just like they pulled it off with Black Panther.
But, whatever the case is, it is a subjective opinion from my side and it's not gonna change anything, it's just a little bit disappointing.
He tried accents basically by the time he got the actors he wanted, so rehiring was probably not an option by that point.
Trying to get accents right by then was probably ruled a time constraint or budget thing by then.
In addition to that he mentioned he recalled watching a movie or show as a younger man where they did something similar (forgoing accents) and found that that detail melted away as time continued and people simply got engrossed in the show.
As an Eastern European myself, I think they are doing everyone a service by not forcing actors to put on some silly-sounding fake Russian accent. This is a far more respectful way to go about it, in my opinion, if they already decided to have the show in English language, rather than hiring actual Ukrainian actors to speak in their native tongue and have the show subbed. Which I can't really blame them for not wanting to do in an expensive show like this, with how much the US audience is alergic to subtitles.
What they did in BP was also criticized. Just recently someone on this forum wrote a pretty good post about.
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Wasn't aware of this, I thought it was praised....as said, in my opinion (which again is my own subjective opinion) it is kinda difficult to believe that they couldn't cast Ukrainian actors who can speak English (which would produce a real accent and not a forced one), it is just sad that Eastern Europeans are always potrayed as terrorists or drug dealers, yet when there's a real opportunity to tell a story that is tied to that region it can't be entrusted to Ukrainian actors. But, enough whining from my side, I'm still enjoying the show :)
It doesn't help that the showrunners claimed that every time they found conflicting accounts they went with the "less outlandish" version because the truth was already so out there.
Even I took it to be much more accurate than it actually is, until I saw the helicopter crash. Then I researched it and found the context was much less dramatic.
I don't blame them. It's a great drama. But the issue was people taking it as historical fact. Feelings are irrelevant.
Que?
The podcast going along with the series goes into the creative liberties they took with the facts and why the main writer took those liberties. Part of it is that some of the events have conflicting accounts and in some cases they took a sort of middle ground with them (like the guys they sent to drain the valve).
At least one of those guys is apparently still alive today. Another died in 2005 but of heart failure.
What a great episode.
Also, what the hell happened witht that helicopter? I thought flying over the core would simply kill the people inside, not destroy the machine itself.
Also, what the hell happened witht that helicopter? I thought flying over the core would simply kill the people inside, not destroy the machine itself.
The problem isn't a character making mistakes, it's literal misinformation. People are going to treat things presented as facts from the established expert character as facts.
You can't blame the audience, but you can sure as hell blame the writing. The issue is that it's really not representing what happened to a startling degree (like the "megatons" garbage), but looks and feels like it is. For example...
The show seems to imply the radiation messed with the helicopter systems or pilots, leading to them getting disoriented, clipping a cable and crashing. In reality there was a helicopter crash near the core but it was months after the accident (and after months of successful drops), and they clipped a crane in broad daylight (had nothing to do with the radiation).