Go Back  DVD Talk Forum > Entertainment Discussions > TV Talk
Reload this Page >

Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

TV Talk Talk about Shows on TV

Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Old 06-04-19, 01:21 AM
  #51  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 12,860
Received 930 Likes on 709 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Amazing finale. I figured it wouldn't be as riveting, what with it being courtroom drama, but the tension as he explained what happened cut in with flashbacks was just plain perfection. Entertaining, horrifying, and educational.
Old 06-04-19, 10:45 AM
  #52  
DVD Talk Special Edition
 
alfredog1976's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Orange County, CA
Posts: 1,604
Received 83 Likes on 62 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by dom56
I hope Jared Harris and the show get a Emmy nomination.
Same here.

Brilliant mini-series, going to check out the podcast for the finale right now
Old 06-04-19, 04:15 PM
  #53  
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
 
DaveNinja's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Sacramento (The City of a Beer)
Posts: 7,505
Received 68 Likes on 50 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

I was disappointed in the finale since I was hoping for another hour of dogs being shot.
just kidding, i thought it was really well done.
Old 06-04-19, 05:31 PM
  #54  
DVD Talk Ruler
 
General Zod's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Santa Clarita, CA
Posts: 24,400
Received 1,261 Likes on 724 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by DaveNinja
I was disappointed in the finale since I was hoping for another hour of dogs being shot.
Plus thanks to new reports, history books, videos, etc.. the spoilers were already out there for how it ended. Why do people have to be like that?
Old 06-05-19, 07:29 AM
  #55  
DVD Talk Ultimate Edition
 
Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: Long Island, NY
Posts: 4,221
Received 16 Likes on 14 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

One of the best TV mini series I've ever seen, incredible work
Old 06-05-19, 08:11 AM
  #56  
DVD Talk Limited Edition
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 6,188
Likes: 0
Received 230 Likes on 165 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

HBO should do a mini series on the fall of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Communist eastern country.
Old 06-05-19, 09:02 AM
  #57  
DVD Talk God
 
Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Directionally Challenged (for DirecTV)
Posts: 130,193
Received 602 Likes on 486 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Excellent miniseries. Beyond depressing, but excellent.
Old 06-05-19, 02:22 PM
  #58  
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
 
Osiris3657's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Denver, Colorado
Posts: 9,926
Received 275 Likes on 177 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Good series, I expect it to be a big Emmy winner
Old 06-06-19, 08:31 AM
  #59  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Marina Del Rey, California
Posts: 10,044
Received 14 Likes on 10 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Great series. That 4th episode felt kinda un-needed but it was otherwise excellent.
Old 06-07-19, 07:50 PM
  #60  
Banned
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 16,823
Likes: 0
Received 72 Likes on 54 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

I don't have HBO, but I did watch the trailer.

This article explains how the trailer's comment about bullets is not scientifically accurate.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael.../#3fd36f6b632f

Consider how one of the scientist heroes describes radiation: as “a bullet.” He asks us to imagine Chernobyl as “three trillion bullets in the air, water and food… that won’t stop firing for 50,000 years.”

But radiation isn’t like a bullet. If it were we would all be dead since we are every moment being shot by radiation bullets. And some of the people who are exposed to the most bullets, such as residents of Colorado, actually live longer.

The same article also cites a lot of other scientific inaccuracies in the movie. Here's one of my favorites:

The most egregious of “Chernobyl” sensationalism is the depiction of radiation as contagious, like a virus. The scientist-hero played by Emily Watson physically drags away the pregnant wife of a Chernobyl firefighter dying from Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS).

“Get out! Get out of here!” Watson screams, as though every second the woman is with her husband she is poisoning her baby.

But radiation is not contagious. Once someone has removed their clothes and been washed, as the firefighters were in real life, and in “Chernobyl,” the radioactivity is internalized.

It is conceivable that blood, urine, or sweat from a victim of ARS could result in some amount of harmful exposure (not infection) but there is no scientific evidence that such a thing occurred during the treatment of Chernobyl victims.

Why, then, do hospitals isolate radiation victims behind plastic screens? Because their immune systems have been weakened and they are at risk of being exposed to something they can’t handle. In other words, the contamination threat is the opposite of that depicted in “Chernobyl.”
And there's this:

Radiation is not the superpotent toxin “Chernobyl” depicts. In episode one, high doses of radiation make workers bleed, and in episode two, a nurse who merely touches a firefighter sees her hand turn bright red, as though burned. Neither thing occurred or is possible.

And this:

There is no good evidence that Chernobyl radiation killed a baby nor that it caused any increase in birth defects.

“We’ve now had a chance to observe all the children that have been born close to Chernobyl,” reported UCLA physician Robert Gale in 1987, and “none of them, at birth, at least, has had any detectable abnormalities.”

Indeed, the only public health impact beyond the deaths of the first responders was 20,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in those aged under 18 at the time of the accident.

The United Nations in 2017 concluded that only 25%, 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation (paragraphs A-C). In earlier studies, the UN estimated there could be up to 16,000 cases attributable to Chernobyl radiation.Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160 over an 80-year lifespan.At the end of the show, HBO claims there was “a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus,” but this too is wrong.Residents of those two countries were “exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,” according to the World Health Organization. If there are additional cancer deaths they will be “about 0.6% of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.”
Old 06-09-19, 12:00 PM
  #61  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Aug 1999
Location: behind the eight ball
Posts: 19,946
Received 225 Likes on 145 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by starseed1981
Great series. That 4th episode felt kinda un-needed but it was otherwise excellent.
The 90 seconds on the roof was enough to make this episode worthwhile.

Old 06-09-19, 08:10 PM
  #62  
Suspended; also need updated email
 
Join Date: Aug 1999
Posts: 16,564
Likes: 0
Received 14 Likes on 13 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

imdb rating of 9.7 with 200 000 votes is unheard of !
Old 06-10-19, 10:06 AM
  #63  
Admin
 
VinVega's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Herding cats
Posts: 35,634
Received 460 Likes on 302 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by dom56
HBO should do a mini series on the fall of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Communist eastern country.
Agreed. They got the period architecture, clothing, general background down so well. It would be amazing if they took on a project like you mentioned.
Old 06-10-19, 11:11 AM
  #64  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 12,860
Received 930 Likes on 709 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

HBO has always been good that way; they did a masterful job with the Andrei Chikatilo movie Citizen X back in the 90s.

I read the same article as Grundle did, and it's a shame that there was so much incorrect embellishment added. There were other things, like the radiation victims being all bloody (doesn't happen), or the scene with the helicopter crashing after flying through the radiation leak (did not happen). It's doubly a shame because some scenes, like the 90 second "bio-robots" sweeping the graphite back into the exposed core DID happen.

I can only imagine that they did that to make the danger of radiation exposure more visible to a TV audience. It has more impact than the exponential increase in cases of thyroid cancer. While it does damper my appreciation of the miniseries, all I can say is if you planted a potato in Pripyat even today, I sure as shit wouldn't drink the vodka you made from it.
Old 06-10-19, 11:13 AM
  #65  
DVD Talk Limited Edition
 
dhmac's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Kissimmee, Florida
Posts: 7,422
Received 67 Likes on 58 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

I decided to check it out and watch just one episodes a couple of days ago. Ended up binging the whole mini-series. Very impressive show. It's also a good reminder, especially for younger people, of how closed off the USSR was and how it constantly spied on its own people.

I was surprised at the end to find out that Emily Watson's character was fictional but at least it did answer my question of why weren't more scientists working on the problem. (There were, but she was created to represent them all in a bit of dramatic simplization.)

And I didn't know about the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure that was installed over the failed reactor until the final episode of this series mentioned it in one of the last images. That in of itself is a very impressive engineering feat. Here's a timelapse of the installation of the NSC structure that's designed to last for at least a century and has robotic devices installed in it that can be used to remotely dismantle the reactor inside.

Old 06-10-19, 12:30 PM
  #66  
DVD Talk Godfather
 
Giantrobo's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 1999
Location: Gateway Cities/Harbor Region
Posts: 63,126
Received 1,748 Likes on 1,093 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by Paff
HBO has always been good that way; they did a masterful job with the Andrei Chikatilo movie Citizen X back in the 90s.

I read the same article as Grundle did, and it's a shame that there was so much incorrect embellishment added. There were other things, like the radiation victims being all bloody (doesn't happen), or the scene with the helicopter crashing after flying through the radiation leak (did not happen). It's doubly a shame because some scenes, like the 90 second "bio-robots" sweeping the graphite back into the exposed core DID happen.

I can only imagine that they did that to make the danger of radiation exposure more visible to a TV audience. It has more impact than the exponential increase in cases of thyroid cancer. While it does damper my appreciation of the miniseries, all I can say is if you planted a potato in Pripyat even today, I sure as shit wouldn't drink the vodka you made from it.

Yeah, Hollywood does that though. In "K-19 Widowmaker" they showed the same physical affects on men who entered the reactor area to work on the reactor cooling issues.


That said, and I realize one shouldn't have to listen to a show's official podcast to find this out, the show creator is very honest about what was created for the show, what is "dramatic license", etc.
Old 06-10-19, 03:19 PM
  #67  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 12,860
Received 930 Likes on 709 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

The main thing I took from this show is about how it all happened. Yeah, I guess I could have looked on Wikipedia, but still, Valeri Legaspov explained it so well.

In junior high, our science teacher explained nuclear power. This was right after Three Mile Island, The China Syndrome, and the whole No Nukes thing. I don't know why, but I remember one thing he said. "Nuclear power plants don't, and CAN'T explode." I assumed he was referring to nuclear energy vs. nuclear weapons. Now, while that was just a junior high school science teacher and not exactly a nuclear physicist, I wondered how Chernobyl could possibly explode when he had said it was impossible. But nothing is impossible, and I doubt anyone could imagine a situation like Chernobyl could even happen. Yet it did. And while we know the steps to take to ensure the exact same disaster doesn't happen again, it's just too damn dangerous to monkey around with a nuclear reaction that literally lasts dozens of years and can't be stopped, and is deadly to anyone who comes in contact with it.

I used to be very pro-nuke in terms of energy. Not anymore. There's got to be better ways.
Old 06-12-19, 09:11 AM
  #68  
DVD Talk Ruler
 
General Zod's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Santa Clarita, CA
Posts: 24,400
Received 1,261 Likes on 724 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Russia's bitching about this series (obviously.. it makes them look bad) saying it's not how it really happened - and they know better. So they are going to do their own version where a CIA spy from the US sabotages the power plant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...sian-tv-remake
Old 06-12-19, 09:16 AM
  #69  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 19,326
Received 873 Likes on 644 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

We're not too far in (can't recall if it was ep2 or 3 we watched last night). Do they ever get into what actually happened? So far it's just "it's impossible for the core to explode", even though they finally know it to be true. The one we just watched was where the scientist and politician guy went there to confirm/start dumping the sand.
Old 06-12-19, 09:18 AM
  #70  
DVD Talk God
 
Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Directionally Challenged (for DirecTV)
Posts: 130,193
Received 602 Likes on 486 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by Noonan
We're not too far in (can't recall if it was ep2 or 3 we watched last night). Do they ever get into what actually happened? So far it's just "it's impossible for the core to explode", even though they finally know it to be true. The one we just watched was where the scientist and politician guy went there to confirm/start dumping the sand.
Yes, they certainly do. In great detail.
Old 06-12-19, 09:20 AM
  #71  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 19,326
Received 873 Likes on 644 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Cool; thanks. That's the info I'm most interested in learning about. I was too young to understand what was happening back then.
Old 06-12-19, 09:50 AM
  #72  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 12,860
Received 930 Likes on 709 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Yes, you'll get the full detail on exactly how it happened, in a very entertaining (I.E., not dry and clinical) manner. Hope this isn't considered a spoiler, but the finale shows Legaspov explaining to the court what happened, juxtaposed with flashbacks to it actually happening. It really was informative and entertaining at the same time.
Old 06-12-19, 10:11 AM
  #73  
DVD Talk Legend
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 19,326
Received 873 Likes on 644 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Sounds good.

I'm having a hard time seeing Stellan as a tough politician even though he's a great actor. He'll always be the professor from Good Will Hunting to me.
Old 06-12-19, 10:59 AM
  #74  
Admin
 
VinVega's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Herding cats
Posts: 35,634
Received 460 Likes on 302 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by General Zod
Russia's bitching about this series (obviously.. it makes them look bad) saying it's not how it really happened - and they know better. So they are going to do their own version where a CIA spy from the US sabotages the power plant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...sian-tv-remake
The sad part about this is that there were some really heroic figures in the miniseries. None of them were portrayed as heartless communists like so many of the Hollywood movies from the Cold War portrayed them. Yes, there were horrible flaws in how the USSR was run (and there are still obviously horrible flaws in how Russia is run), but overall, I had a positive impression of all the characters who risked everything to try to stop a nuclear nightmare from befalling all of Europe. You could even sympathize with Gorbachev's situation. Yes, they had to kill men to fix this, but what other choice was there?

I think the whole concept of embarrassment is a big part of why they did many of the things they did. You can't embarrass the state because people might want to pick another form of government. The government is really frightened of its own people. This element is still present in Russia today clearly by the link above.
Old 06-12-19, 11:06 AM
  #75  
DVD Talk Godfather
 
Giantrobo's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 1999
Location: Gateway Cities/Harbor Region
Posts: 63,126
Received 1,748 Likes on 1,093 Posts
Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19

Originally Posted by Noonan
Sounds good.

I'm having a hard time seeing Stellan as a tough politician even though he's a great actor. He'll always be the professor from Good Will Hunting to me.
If you can, check out the official podcast for this show.

Thread Tools
Search this Thread

Archive - Advertising - Cookie Policy - Privacy Statement - Terms of Service -

Copyright © 2024 MH Sub I, LLC dba Internet Brands. All rights reserved. Use of this site indicates your consent to the Terms of Use.