Director Bradley Parker shot “Chernobyl Diaries” in the manner of the popular scare-fest \u201cThe Blair Witch Project\u201d using hand held cameras and like that film, the characters film themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 Three young people are in the Ukraine visiting a friend\u2019s brother, Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) who now lives there.\u00a0 Screen writers Shane and Cary Van Dyke, round out the characters by touching on their relationships, such as Paul\u2019s sibling rivalry with younger brother, Chris (Jesse McCartney, who looks like a young Leonardo diCaprio), and Chris\u2019s love interest, Natalie (Olivia Dudley).\u00a0 The dialogue shows them to be sophisticated, mature people in that no one says \u201clike\u201d or \u201canyways.\u201d
\nPaul bullies the others into joining him and another couple on an extreme tour run by Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) a blocky, shaven-headed, alien-from-another-planet-like dude.\u00a0 Their destination?\u00a0 Chernobyl- site of the worst nuclear disaster until last year\u2019s catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan that damaged its Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor, laying waste everything for miles.
\nThe premise of \u201cChernobyl\u201d is that Russia is keeping secrets of what became of people who didn\u2019t, or couldn\u2019t, evacuate the Ukrainian town of Prypiat, two miles distant from Chernobyl, by order of the Soviet Union.\u00a0 Everyone was given only five minutes to pack up and leave.\u00a0 A fleet of buses was conscripted to take the inhabitants to safety, after the nuclear meltdown twenty five years ago.\u00a0\u00a0 The film hints that the old, the sick, the invalids, and the infirm who couldn\u2019t leave are imprisoned there to slowly die of radiation poisoning; the healthier ones are not allowed to leave lest they tell others about what\u2019s really going on.\u00a0 We see this as a possibility in the fate suffered by Amanda (Devin Kelly) as the last survivor.
\nBilled in the horror genre, first-time director Bradley Parker \u2018s \u201cChernobyl Diaries\u201d will disappoint horror movie fans.\u00a0 It is slow moving except when characters run through labyrinthine passageways trying to escape things that go bump in the night or flee ravenous beasts; and it is bereft of creepy, supernatural, ghoulish monsters.\u00a0 Though glimpses of small, bald, or hooded figures are seen in windows or creeping ominously and intently after the tourists making their way around in the dark.
\nIn Uri\u2019s beat up military van, they approach Prypiat once inhabited by hundreds of families whose adult members once worked at the Chernobyl nuclear facility.\u00a0 They are stopped at the gate by a guard who tells them that the facility is closed due to maintenance.\u00a0\u00a0 But of course, Uri knows a secret way in.\u00a0 They take pictures of the area that once boasted tree-shaded gardens and a playground with a Ferris wheel and other rides, now eerily still and rusted.\u00a0 Everything is desiccated; and the old concrete Soviet era blockhouse, hi-rise apartments (like Cabrini-Green) are strewn with rubble and rusted metal.
\nLed by a confidant Uri, they wend their way in the half-light through apartments still furnished with overturned tables and chairs, a school with dust-covered desks and papers strewn around, a hospital ward with rusted iron beds, and here and there lay creepy, tattered, soiled ,eyeless doll, and weird-looking labs featuring weird-looking machines covered with dust and debris.\u00a0 They hear noises.\u00a0 Uri assures them not to worry, nothing can live here.\u00a0\u00a0 The setting is haunting.\u00a0\u00a0 Then something happens to belie Uri\u2019s assurance.\u00a0 They realize they should not have come, so pile into Uri\u2019s van.\u00a0 Night is falling.\u00a0 Predictably the vehicle breaks down; things go from bad to really, horribly bad until there is just one of the six tourists left, then none.\u00a0 One inconsistency is that the tourists start out exploring Prypiat on foot, yet appear to end up in the damaged reactor itself, two miles away.
\nI believe Parker\u2019s \u201cChernobyl Diaries\u201d is timely and important; but it got bad reviews.\u00a0 People wanted more horror.\u00a0 What can be more horrifying than a domestic nuclear plant explosion and meltdown which kills people, contaminates and lays waste land for hundreds of miles and for hundreds if not thousands of years?\u00a0\u00a0 This could be the future for Okuma, Futaba, and other towns which lie within a fifty mile radius of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.\u00a0 Most of the footage for \u201cChernobyl\u201dwas shot in Prypiat.\u00a0\u00a0 I recommend seeing the Greenpeace and BBC videos of the history of Chernobyl and Prypiat- then and now- on You Tube. Also, tours to Prypiat are as routinely conducted today as there are to the ghost-haunted remains of the prison of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Director Bradley Parker shot “Chernobyl Diaries” in the manner of the popular scare-fest \u201cThe Blair Witch Project\u201d using hand held cameras and like that film, the characters film themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 Three…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"