Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19
#51
DVD Talk Legend
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.
#52
DVD Talk Special Edition
#53
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
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.
just kidding, i thought it was really well done.
#55
DVD Talk Ultimate Edition
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
#56
DVD Talk Limited Edition
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.
#59
DVD Talk Legend
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.
#60
Banned
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.
The same article also cites a lot of other scientific inaccuracies in the movie. Here's one of my favorites:
And there's this:
And this:
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
#61
DVD Talk Legend
#64
DVD Talk Legend
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.
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.
#65
DVD Talk Limited Edition
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.
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.
#66
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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.
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.
#67
DVD Talk Legend
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.
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.
#68
DVD Talk Ruler
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
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...sian-tv-remake
#69
DVD Talk Legend
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.
#70
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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.
#71
DVD Talk Legend
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.
#72
DVD Talk Legend
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.
#73
DVD Talk Legend
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.
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.
#74
Admin
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
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...sian-tv-remake
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.
#75
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Re: Chernobyl (HBO mini series) S: Emily Watson, Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard -- premieres 5/6/19