Chernobyl Abyss
Directed by Danila Kozlovsky
Written by Aleksey Kazakov & Elena Ivanova
Produced by Alexander Rodnyansky, Sergey Melkumov, Danila Kozlovsky, Vadim Vereshchagin, Rafael Minasbekyan
Starring Danila Kozlovsky, Oksana Akinshina, Filipp Avdeev, Ravshana Kurkova, Nikolay Kozak
Cinematography Kseniya Sereda
Edited by Mariya Likhachyova
Music by Oleg Karpachev
Production companies Central Partnership, Group of Companies Gpm Kit, Non-Stop Productions
Distributed by Central Partnership
The plot summary for Russia’s Chernobyl Abyss was … peculiar. In total, it read, “The film tells about a firefighter who heroically liquidates the consequences of the tragedy at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.”
“OK,” I thought. “This Wikipedia stub was probably written by some apparatchik at Central Partnership (the state outfit that produced the movie) and perhaps his English is uncertain.”
Deliberate nor not, it turned out to be an accurate summation of the film. The firefighter in question, Alexey Karpushin, is Heroic. Capital H heroic. John Crichton heroic. Benton Fraser heroic. Dudley Doright heroic. Errol Flynn heroic. You get the idea. Stop me before I say Rocky the Flying Squirrel heroic.
Alexey, played by Danila Valeryevich Kozlovsky (who also produced the film) may be lousy at relationships, a bit feckless, and more than a bit dim, but oh, boy, is he resolute.
He’s also apparently invulnerable. At one point, he’s on the roof of the reactor building wearing only standard firefighter clothes, chucking pieces of weirdly warm graphite aside while men around him are quite literally melting from the immense does of radiation, and all he gets out of it is a mild sunburn and a bit of a itchy rash.
His twelve-year-old son apparently shares his immunity. He is standing perhaps a hundred meters from the reactor with his friends, and is asking, “What is that blue glow?” That would be Cherenkov radiation, and if you can see it, you’re dead. He ends up with a fever and a bit of a cough, but recovers nicely.
While it does show some people dying (hard not to mention that 31 died in the immediate aftermath of the disaster) no mention is made of the hazard the patients are to the staff other than a nurse advising Alexey that he can’t visit his dying captain without a radioactive garment, advice Alexey ignores.
This habit of treating severe radiation exposure as being little worse than a mild case of flu or overdoing it on a sunny day at the beach tends to trivialize the catastrophe.
Even the famed Soviet humor, a mainstay of many fine Russian productions, is missing here. The only occurrence is when Alexey presents his love interest with a singularly unappealing cake. She takes a bite, and he asks her how it is. “It meets the standards of the Soviet state,” is her reply. Honestly, it was the best line in the movie.
Robert Harrington wrote of HBO’s brilliant Chernobyl, “The man who blew the whistle on the lies that made the Chernobyl disaster possible said it best. In reminding the Soviet Union that its lies were ultimately its greatest enemy — Mikhail Gorbachev was convinced that Chernobyl was the principal cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union — Soviet science minister Valery Legasov said in a dramatized scene in the documentary, ‘Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”’
It is a truism dismissed in Chernobyl Abyss. The only time the question of how the disaster could happen comes up is shrugged off dismissively as bureaucratic inability to react to sudden developments.
It shows the exodus of people from Pripyat, and chaotic scenes at hospital, but when it comes to the extent and horror of the situation, it pulls its punches. Similarly, it fails to address the myriad failures, both to prevent the accident in the first place and in addressing the problem once the melt-down occurred.
It truly does liquidate the consequences.
HBO’s extraordinary Chernobyl shows the lessons we must learn from use of fission power. Chernobyl Abyss is a response, one that suggests that in Russia, that necessary lesson has not been learned.