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I have finally caught up with Chernobyl, which aired on HBO last year around this time and elicited rapture from everyone everywhere. I don't know when it came out on DVD but I finally checked for it last week, and have been enjoying(?) the escape(?) from an atmosphere of apocalyptic gloom, to a time and place of even more apocalyptic gloom.
And it was good! It was good. Excellently made, mind-bogglingly researched, clearly presented, capably acted, suitably horrific. There were sequences that were literally heart-pounding. Utterly transporting filmmaking, which is what it is supposed to do. It deserves its famous full marks on IMDb.
But overall, it just kept reminding me of The Terror, and not in a way that necessarily flattered the more prestigious production. For all the expensive craft HBO threw at Chernobyl, The Terror surpasses it in one very important way: it's about the characters. Chernobyl used the characters to tell the story of a disaster, but they were essentially shadow-puppets gesturing to the bigger picture. The Terror is about the characters, how relationships grow and change through hardship, how people find better or worse sides of themselves, how pack bonding leads to care leads to love and what that looks like in extremity. The Terror uses horror to tell a human story; Chernobyl uses humans to tell a horror story. There is a lot of spectacle in Chernobyl, as it presents to us the scope of a nuclear disaster, and it comes around to some Big Ideas about truth and sacrifice, but I never cared for the characters half as intensely as I did in The Terror, and it's that pathos that raises the latter to the next level, in my opinion.
So, if you haven't seen it, please give The Terror a spin, especially if you liked Chernobyl. It's about a circle and a rectangle who start out hating each other but become friends over the course of trying to save as many people as possible from a hostile environment that they got themselves into, so it will be familiar territory. But this time, with feeling!
And it was good! It was good. Excellently made, mind-bogglingly researched, clearly presented, capably acted, suitably horrific. There were sequences that were literally heart-pounding. Utterly transporting filmmaking, which is what it is supposed to do. It deserves its famous full marks on IMDb.
But overall, it just kept reminding me of The Terror, and not in a way that necessarily flattered the more prestigious production. For all the expensive craft HBO threw at Chernobyl, The Terror surpasses it in one very important way: it's about the characters. Chernobyl used the characters to tell the story of a disaster, but they were essentially shadow-puppets gesturing to the bigger picture. The Terror is about the characters, how relationships grow and change through hardship, how people find better or worse sides of themselves, how pack bonding leads to care leads to love and what that looks like in extremity. The Terror uses horror to tell a human story; Chernobyl uses humans to tell a horror story. There is a lot of spectacle in Chernobyl, as it presents to us the scope of a nuclear disaster, and it comes around to some Big Ideas about truth and sacrifice, but I never cared for the characters half as intensely as I did in The Terror, and it's that pathos that raises the latter to the next level, in my opinion.
So, if you haven't seen it, please give The Terror a spin, especially if you liked Chernobyl. It's about a circle and a rectangle who start out hating each other but become friends over the course of trying to save as many people as possible from a hostile environment that they got themselves into, so it will be familiar territory. But this time, with feeling!
