Chernobyl is a hideous and haunting sight, from start to finish

The Washington Post

"HBO’s fascinating and necessarily bleak miniseries Chernobyl is every bit as grim as it looks — maybe even grimmer than that. How could it not be?" says Hank Stuever. "It takes viewers back to the Ukrainian town of Pripyat in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, when an explosion occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, showering the site with radioactive chunks of graphite and releasing a toxic plume that put much of Western Europe, Scandinavia and the western side of the Soviet Union at risk for deadly contamination. Workers scramble to prevent further damage to the reactor’s core; local firefighters rush to the blaze (and, for many of them, eventual doom); residents gather on a nearby bridge to get a better view of the glowing flames in the distance while their children play in a gentle sprinkling of toxic ash....Depressing as it may be, Chernobyl, created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, is a fine study in the uses of sanctioned obfuscation — and how much easier that becomes in a country where media and scientific leadership are tightly restricted. There was a time when that sort of thing might have seemed entirely foreign to an American audience; now, it’s another resonant alarm sounding uncomfortably close."

ALSO:

• Chernobyl makes the horror of nuclear disaster thinkable
• Some moments in Chernobyl are a philosophical gut-punch, others are bleakly absurd
• The only drawback is the use of British accents: It's like Downton Abbey or The Crown dropped into a Russian disaster movie
• Chernobyl finds horror and beauty in one of the worst disasters of all time
• It’s the way Chernobyl introduces the event that initially grabs you
• Chernobyl is a thorough historical analysis, a gruesome disaster epic and a mostly riveting drama -- that is also a warning
• Chernobyl shows how good science is undermined by secrecy
• How much of Chernobyl is fact vs. fiction?
• Chernobyl was able to film at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, a sister site to Chernobyl in Lithuania