"Chernobyl Diaries" does present an interesting setup: during a visit to Kiev, four friends are persuaded to undertake an "extreme tourism" side trip to Prypiat, an abandoned city close to the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The group includes brothers Paul and Chris, Chris's soon-to-be fiancée Natalie, and her friend Amanda. It's almost not worth the time it takes to relate character names, because there isn't much that differentiates one from another, beyond a couple of vague lines framing Paul as flaky and irresponsible. Of course, Paul is the one who persuades the quartet to accompany sketchy local guide Uri, who runs a one-man tourism outfit, to Prypiat despite the empty city's off-limits status and probable radiation danger. Sure, it seems legit.With a couple of other tourists along for the ride, everyone piles into Uri's beat-up van – another great omen – for the two-hour drive into the radiation zone. They hit the outskirts, only to be turned back by dour guards at an eastern-bloc cliché of a checkpoint, but not to worry: Uri knows a back way into Prypiat. Of course he does.
The long-way-around drive ushers in the most interesting stretch of the movie, as the initially cheerful tourists are appropriately cowed by stretches of eerily deserted forest and an abandoned security outpost that they pass through along their way.
When they finally reach Prypiat, it's like an urban explorer's ultimate dream come true. The city is, as advertised, abandoned and falling to ruin, with long blocks of moldering apartment complexes displaying peeling Soviet-era murals, stretches of cracked and weed-choked pavement, and decrepit municipal buildings just waiting to be reconnoitered. There is a towering, rusty Ferris wheel looming over the proceedings; Uri explains that it was constructed for the May Day celebration (true story!) in the spring of the Chernobyl accident and has been decaying ever since. It's a great set piece, encapsulating in a glance the tragedy of a community torn apart in the wake of the meltdown.
When it comes time to pack up and head back to Kiev, the trouble begins – both for the protagonists, and for the viewer. Uri can't start the van, and he determines that it has been tampered with. Dusk sets in, and Uri and Chris head out to find help; Chris stumbles back to the van a short time later, the victim of unseen attackers in the woods. The tourists are stranded miles from civilization, their guide has disappeared, nobody knows where they are, their radios aren't reaching anyone, and there's something out there in the dark.
It still sounds like an interesting setup, but unfortunately with every opportunity that the filmmakers have to move the story forward in a novel way, they instead reach for a cliché. A subset of the group heads out on a poorly considered mission to bring back help, but they don't go very far. They return to the van and find it destroyed, and their comrades missing; video footage on a smartphone yields a paltry couple of clues. As their predicament continues, the survivors are separated and/or picked off, resulting in repetitive sequences of characters running down tunnels with flashlights and screaming, or fighting off attackers and screaming, or losing track of one another and screaming. When the mystery of who or what has been menacing the hapless tourists is finally revealed, it's – well, it's pretty much what you would expect it to be in a horror movie about an abandoned city on the edge of a nuclear fallout zone.
With all of this silliness going on right in front of the viewer, it's easy to miss one moment where the horror is in the background: Paul, who has been searching for replacement parts for the damaged van, pauses for a moment and gazes at the cooling towers of the Chernobyl reactor off in the distance. It is probably safe to say that we have been conditioned over the years to feel a sense of unease at the sight of such towers, and this setup, the looming reactor in the background and the ruined city in the foreground, makes for an unquestionably eerie tableau. It's a shame that the rest of the movie couldn't live up to the promise of this genuinely unsettling moment.
| Movie title | Chernobyl Diaries |
|---|---|
| Release year | 2012 |
| MPAA Rating | R |
| Our rating | |
| Summary | "Paranormal Activity" creator Oren Peli abandons the found-footage format for a more traditional - and sadly cliche-ridden - horror movie. |
