Chernobyl is hot right now, no pun intended. There was a mini-series out recently that was simply amazing. I’ve seen a bunch of actual documentaries on it, so I figured why not watch a horror movie that uses it as a backdrop for spooky stuff?
A group of friends, two of which that are brothers, are backpacking around Europe in a whirlwind tour of all things exotic and foreign to them. Rome, England, France have all been checked off the list. The group is gearing up to head to Moscow but one of the brothers decides to go on his own and find a tour of Chernobyl. It’s a bit of an “underground” tour and seems a little sketchy, but everyone decides to take the chance. So the group of four plus a random couple meet and are quickly on their way to discovering the history of Chernobyl face to face.
The group quickly finds that being on a shady and mostly illegal tour of Chernobyl has its problems. They are stopped at a security checkpoint and turned away. Not to be so easily throttled, the tour guide decides to take matters into his own hands and takes the group on his own personalized super secret tour. Things quickly go from bad to worse for the group as they run into a radioactive bear, and their car breaks down leaving them stranded for the night in Chernobyl.
I first want to say that coming fresh off of the HBO mini-series telling the story of Chernobyl may have painted this movie in a different light. However, to its credit, the stuff they got right, they got really right. A lot of the sets, though compressed together more than they should have been, were pretty accurate to everything I have seen or read about Chernobyl and the Exclusion Zones. The abandoned Prypiat, the look of the power plant, the visual bombardment of chest-thumping, pro-Russia propaganda is great. It’s the rest of the film that falls flat.
Most of the film is full of off-camera threats or more than a few “wazzat” moments. I respect that a movie attempts to make the viewer create their own mental picture of what hell awaits them. There is some good build-up to the ending, but by the time the actual “big bad” is revealed I was so over the movie I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Personally, it just feels like all the story and relationship building has the carpet pulled out from under it by the let down of an ending.
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