This show is so frightening, I love it.
Absolutely stunning pictures of a tragic event. This is frightening and scary at the same time!
I can't think of any TV series that has ever impacted me like this one. I was quite familiar with the true story of the Chernobyl disaster, but the way that this dramatized the event and retained historical accuracy was amazing.
I didn't know they spoke such fluent English in Russia. They should've talked Russian! We have subtitles for a reason, yes?
Contrary to what I'm sure the green muppets will claim this is not a movie about nuclear power and dangers with it. Instead it's a really good movie showing the dangers with socialism. Party elitism, political appointments of useless people to positions they they should never have been considered for and incompetence running rampant.
I didn't know they spoke such fluent English in Russia. They should've talked Russian! We have subtitles for a reason, yes?
Watching this show is like driving passed an accident on the road... you know you shouldn't stare but you just cannot stop yourself from looking.
Chernobyl has all the hallmarks of a classic, and has already gone down in the history books.
It is gripping, humbling, shocking, thought provoking, beautifully filmed, edited with a razor sharp knife and so well acted.
The level of detail made it feel like they were actually filming as it happened... incredibly realistic.
English language use "to make things easier" aside, this is completely faultless telly... even down to the seriously creepy soundtrack music.
When it comes around to award season, this is going to clear up.
I give it 9.5/10.
Watch it, you will not be disappointed... just scared.
One of the best shows of the year so far. Only 5 episodes in total & definitely a must watch. It is however a harrowing watch. Like most people, I had heard about the Chernobyl disaster, but didn`t know much beyond the surface level facts. This show really educated me, in a way that was similar to when I watched Band of Brothers. Really well written, acted & produced. It gives real respect to the thousands of men & women who worked tirelessly to bring the catastrophe under control & does an excellent job of putting you into that time period, in a country that was under communist rule. Its scary how close we came to having an even bigger catastrophe, except for the brains & heroics of those people. This series does an excellent job in reminding us how fragile our world is & how we must learn from mistakes made in our past.
Anti-soviet propaganda and lie.
But visual part is great, very similar to reality, I can confirm that.
It's a good show, great visual, details and dialogues but there's too much propaganda against Russia.
What a masterpiece! Astonished by how vividly recreated the whole situation is. 10/10
A series I avoided for almost three years due to too much hype, but today I have to say I should have watched it a long time ago. The atmosphere is truly overwhelming and some of the events depicted sent chills down my spine. Clearly none of us will know the full truth of what happened back then. Only the people who won't tell it to anyone else know it, and those who might won't tell it either. That aside, the series is really well made and you'll hardly resist watching it in one go.
What is the cost of lies ?
Except for the few dramaturgical scenes, this mini-series captures the zeitgeist incredibly precisely while staying informative even for people familiar with the story. Great photography and a haunting soundtrack elevates it then even further to the top of the genre.
Riveting and scary at the same time. great depiction of a disaster that could of easily made most of europe uninhabitable. 10/10
HBO: let’s make a mini series about one of the worst environmental disasters to happen in Russia!
Also HBO: let’s fill it entirely with every type of English actor we have.
Wild that everyone at the Chernobyl plant had British accents. Here’s a little food for thought @ the film industry, hire Russian actors.......to play Russians! Fixed it! You can even hire ones that speak English.
If only it were not about a real accident, real radiation, I would have rated it much higher.
Here's the problem: Chernobyl is visually as close to a perfect representation of late 1980s USSR and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident as anything.
Except it blows the scale of the accident itself out of proportion, presents urban legends and the unfounded fear of irradiated people being radioactive as fact and even outright lies about the number of victims in the epilogue. And the vodka? In the middle of "sukhoy zakon", the Soviet version of prohibition?
It feels like it tries to respect the victims and heroes of the tragedy, but then, it sacrifices a lot of its credibility.
Don't get me wrong, if we take out its claim to be a docudrama, Chernobyl is a good, even if scientifically inaccurate, work of fiction.
But as docudramas go, it's 5 out of 10.
“When the truth offends, we lie and we lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there."
Chernobyl was a gripping experience through and through. All the theatrical elements—the screenwriting, acting, cinematography, sound design, art direction—were masterly put together, allowing one to immerse in an unadulterated realism. To feel as if you were there. To feel the anxious pressure of impending doom, the hollow throb of death and the numb of hopeless devastation.
The phenomenal storytelling and the entire experience lifted this series above the rest for me. Every scene carries a weight and not a second is wasted in its run-time.
100%
Positives:
Absolutely gripping from the beginning to the very end. The acting is phenomenal. The way they tell the story is nothing short of perfect. The sound effects and the music make it so much more intense and is perfect. The fact that this is a True Story is amazing. The makeup is unbelievable and when you see the burn victims you feel that it is real and not makeup. This is by far the best TV Show of the year and so glad it won the Golden Globe.
Negatives:
There is nothing wrong with this show and I would chance absolutely nothing.
Overall:
I would recommend this show to anybody and I feel that every person should watch the show. This was my 2nd times watching the series through and it gets better every time.
We live in a fragile world; a show like this explains just how fragile and how close we all, perhaps, come to destruction at the hands of idiots every day
Well made but I was disappointed to find out this was largely fiction. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/chernobyl/
What an absolute amazing series this was. The acting was stellar, it wasnt glorified, it didnt have that Hollywood exaggeration to it at all. The story, I know, is based on real events but felt real, it felt plausible. It was immersive, scary, and really exposes the human condition our current world is suffering from...once again... greed, self-importance, and power mongering.
The woman scientist didn't exist. Reprogramming society.
GOT: Filming the Long Night was intense.
Chernobyl: Hold my vodka.
In one of the strongest historical TV shows ever made, Chernobyl paints a terrifying, realistic and emotional picture of what went wrong with the Chernobyl disaster and why.
The best show I have ever seen.
The most hard hitting series in the recent times. You will feel the agony and you will come to know how the world is rigged just to satisfy the personal needs. Makes you feel ashamed about the human race
DO WATCH IT OF YOU HAVEN'T YET HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Surely,one of the best work based on a true event.The way everything from the science to the sufferings were presented in such a meticulous way that you will be totally invested in it.You are sure to have goosebumps while hearing the bitter truths of this disaster.The execution of this series made it something which can crreate an impact on the whole world.Hats off to the creators and the heroes of the incident.
Very well done and top notch acting but hard to watch and makes you sick to the stomach seeing how they treated their own people...what an absolutely terrible but avoidable tragedy... I am glad it's over and I will never watch again
was an ok show to be honest. Very overrated and overhyped.
Best show of 2021 - gripping, tense and poignant
This was incredible. The images were powerful, the directing, the casting... everything made this a mini series to remember.
it's great a series A series that you may see on the small screen
I came late to the game on this one, but I’ve spent the entirety of my afternoon marveling at the masterpiece that is Chernobyl. Everything I’ve heard was true, the writers, the cast, the production, the producers; they championed the heroes, the bravery and sacrifices of the men and women who stood their grounds against immeasurable odds and the men and Statesmen that buried their heads in the sand out of fear and arrogance — that thrusted the Soviet Union and really the world into a global catastrophe which ultimately amounted to politics of the most grievous nature being the cause of such a preventable loss. Chernobyl was a mind blowing incident and the writers of this series did a remarkable job in conveying that. Well worth the watch.
Chilling historical drama, not sure I could ever watch it again but then again it's pretty seared into my mind.
Amazing show I will remember for a long time.
Absolutely brilliant! I't really opens your eyes to what happened at that turbulent time.
10 - Totally ninja!
You can totally feel the dread of nucleair apocalypse in this series, even though I know roughly what happened and how it ended I was still stuck to my screen rooting for the main characters to come out on top.
This is a really well acted show with excellent production values. Definitely worth a watch.
A very gripping docu-drama
Amazingly scary. Quality does not seem affected by the restriction of being a true story.
Storyline quality: 8/10
Characters: 8/10
Originality: 9/10
Acting, directing and technical quality: 9/10
Progression: 10/10 (maybe a little too fast)
Consistency (low if mistakes in plot etc.): 10/10
Intensity (cliffhangers, edge of seat and the like): 7/10
(Please like comment if helpful, and I'll keep writing them this way)
Was unsure about this series after the first episode but glad my girlfriend wanted to keep watching as it turned out to be brilliant. A must watch.
I need the eleventh heart.
I love it. It is a drama not exactly as it happened and I am okay with that.
This show is scary good. You can read up on Chernobyl all you want, watch documentaries, but nothing comes close to this in portraying the horrific nature of what is the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Thrilling to watch and terrifying to think about
horribly boring specially if you know the truth behind it
Just finished watching this series after having put it off for years. The Chernobyl disaster fascinated me since I was a bot of 8, and we were told in the Netherlands, that we coulnd't eat homegrown crops anymore and had to dispose of everyting. At that age I didn't understand why, but this sparked my interest. Having since watched nearly every documentary available on the disaster I now understand the science behind why we needed to do this, even thousands of miles away from the disaster.
I would fear this series would portray a dramatized version of events, but I think it turns out it didn't, and the horrifying story is very close to how it actually happened. Besides the the facts of how the disaster happened at the Chernobyl site, it was interesting (and astonishing) to see the political side of the story that was the fundament of how things progressed up to and after the disaster.
Also a strong point of the series is the eeriness portrayed around the enourmus amount of nuclear radiation, and the affect it will have on the (supposedly) oblivious actors in various scenes. Bone chilling.
Truly harrowing. Absolutely infuriating. Once again, the arrogance and egocentricity of those in power costed many civilians their lives.
it's actually "Chornobyl" since it translates from Ukrainian, not ruzzian.
and yes, watched this show only this year (summer 2023) right when we all thought that ruzzia would attack our nuclear power plant n we gonna simply die.
it hurts even more when u know it's your history, history of your country, history that u heard from your parents (my dad had his 14th birthday that day), not from tv shows.
and that was hard to watch since first seconds, cus I know how explosions n siren feels like.
Glory to Ukraine, Glory to Heroes.
This was absolutely amazing!! The cinematography, acting, characters, just amazing! It's so well made that it makes you feel like you're there in Chernobyl!
Rest in peace for all the heros who sacrificed their lives for humanity and the truth. You'll never be forgotten.
Mind blowing experience and incredible and detailed show
HORRIFYING!!! This show defines the line "With Great Powers comes Great Responsibility"
Absolutely sublime. One of the best singular seasons of television I've ever seen without a doubt.
There was never any risk of a 4 megaton explosion. Come on.
Phenomenal! I really hadn't heard of this show before I watched it.
Notwithstanding occasional accuracy, the dialogues cleverly tried to insinuate it was all fault of the ideology of the erstwhile USSR. Mocking Soviet Space programs, labeling their agencies/govt full of deceit/lies or making passing references of US supremacy in between makes this a puke-worthy propaganda with ulterior motive of Narrative Establishment. Bureaucratic negligence wasn't a unique Soviet feature, in fact US has had more nuclear accidents covered up by their lapdog media. Nevertheless it fared well as a cinematic piece.
Terrifying and haunting, but presented in a beautiful way, and would've been a great show without them, but Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard give truly amazing performances that elevate the series to another level.
Top-tier television. Excellent storytelling and fantastic acting
Terrifying and sobering – as exceptional a piece of television narrative as you're ever likely to see
Equal parts political deconstruction and painstaking recreation of what it must have been like to live through the worst nuclear disaster in history, the show presents a terrifying, nightmare vision of how bad things can get when hard scientific facts are made subservient to political agendas, and governments strive to undermine not only scientific expertise but the very nature of truth itself (the Soviet Union was a big fan of "alternative facts" long before the GOP). Chernobyl begins and ends by asking the viewer to ponder the cost of cumulative nation-wide lies. However, it's just as interested in celebrating the heroes as it is assigning blame, and in that sense, it has an extraordinary sense of humanism.
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/1LGDBb
The best and best show of 2019..perfect narration. May God rest the souls of our dear brothers,sisters and children we lost during those horrific times
Good show, pretty accurate representation
A luxury series. Very well set and narrated.
It's a nice mini-series with great visuals and acting, but it has some mayor flaws: the fact that the cast is entirely whether english or american being set in the soviet union; how it claims total accuracy but it doesn't have it at all (not even in the epilogue), including lies and a great dose of dramatization; and how it's full of anti-soviet and anti-communist propaganda when many other countries have acted like that through history (lies, blackmailing, etc.) and still do.
The best thing HBO ever did.
You want a real and well worked series, then give Chernobyl Play.
A very good cast, some first-rate conversations, of course you can see the side of the story from which they are pulling, but it is very well managed.
A shocking photograph and wardrobe, a raw and real story not suitable for everyone.
A highly recommended wonder that you must see yes or yes.
Stunning in its tragedy. A must watch.
An excellent dramatization of one of the saddest events in history. Great acting, nice effects and scenery. I loved it and I recommend it.
Superb miniseries. A perfect knit five and a half hour runtime of body horror and tragedy from an unbelievable turn of events. Even more horrifying than the body horror are the despicable men in suits and higher ups that made all the wrong decisions. The series also follows the workers, nurses, first responders, and citizens that didn't know what they were getting into. From what I hear this show is a pretty accurate depiction of what went down at the Chernobyl power plant and it is absolutely terrifying. Great acting and directing this is HBO at it's finest! The only negative I have is that I wouldn't have minded if it were in Russian with subtitles. Don't get me wrong it's a perfect show but it being in Russian would've been the cherry on top.
I'm glad this show is going to expose more people as to what happened at Chernobyl and why it was one of the greatest fuck ups in human history, making 18+ miles in a circle radius completely uninhabitable. The show does a great job creating shocks and presenting it in a dramatic fashion. Despite one or two things that are fabricated for the sake of showmanship or turning elongated events into concise ones, the show doesn't tarnish anything that happened and paints a very disturbing picture that hopefully illustrates to new audiences why the event was so tragic. This is extremely good work and I hope even more mini series' come out in it's wake.
Also, I liked Superhero Movie, so I was here first.
Chernobyl is absolutely harrowing. They really outdid themselves on research with this one. Makeup, special effects, casting, all spot on. The credits of the last episode where they do real comparison shots from the real life trial to the one in the show really blew my mind. No spoilers though. Get out there and start shoveling comrade!
Finally got around to watching it. What an incredible masterpiece. Quite possibly the best series I’ve ever watched.
History happened again, this time is nCov2019, lies, lies, lies
Very entertaining and good acting but it's not a 9 or 10/10.
I think is not so good, it'si a series with a little anti-communist view/propaganda, I feel it mediocre, for example, the main dialogs must have been in Russian not with the typical US Russian accents.
The only TV Show or movie to give me chills throughout my whole body. I feel like saying anything more will do it a disservice, so all I can say is... Watch it. There will be no regrets in seeing the reality of that tragedy.
Great historical TV show, very dark and probably too realistic.
A competent depiction of the events, with balanced dramatisation, equal parts entertaining and accurate. It was unextraordinary, however, and I don't see why everyone is raving about it. It would probably be more entertaining, were it a slightly more abridged film.
I was a bit turned off by the rhetoric of the monologues but that's nitpicking. This is amazing TV, impeccably produced, written, directed and acted, incredibly gripping and moving, fascinating, admirable in the adaptation work. Great stuff.
I'm waiting for such an HBO series about Fukushima. It is true that there was no explosion but the contamination is much greater ("thankfully" of oceanic water). In Fukushima no robot was able to work in the contaminated area, and the official radiation value was given ... as in Chernobyl, the maximum measuring range of the instruments.
A very interesting and well made tv show. Of course not all of it is true, but it is nice to get a general overview of what happened back then and to remember how bad those regimes really were.
Good actors and interesting photography.
"When the truth offends, we lie and lie until the truth is no longer visible but it's always there. Sooner or later the debt must always be repaid. Our lies are what define us. And that's how a RBMK Reactor explodes."
I rarely get scared at any horror movies, but this got to me. Not the fact it happened, but how it happened and the affects they don't want you to see.
I can't remember the last time I was this gripped and tense. Absolutely horrifying, heartbreaking and gut-wrenching.
Superb performances all around. Jared Harris should be in everything.
One of the best shows of 2019
A nearly perfect Mini-Series. The historical disaster is described in great detail and in a horrorific and personal way. Every episode is a slow demonic immersion in the boiling nuclear crisis in the hope of a resolution.
I could have done without the fourth episode, and it would be an almost perfect miniseries. Overall it's a solid one though, aside from its taste for maybe too impassioned speeches that kind of undermine the sober approach I loved. This is a story that still continues to be told.
An interesting idea for a fictionalized document. It is a pity that the focus was only on the USSR. In the case of Chernobyl, the west was also not crystal clear and politics in the 90s influenced the transparency of the actual extent of the catastrophe.
Just finished this mini-series, and must say that the hype is well earned. Fantastic performances, noble portrayals of the persons involved in this tragedy, and though simplified - it is technically quite accurate. (I'm an armchair physicist.)
I'm disappointed that modern Russian officials are so upset by this show. It's a gripping portrayal of the ultimate bravery and sacrifice of the Russian people. And a damning condemnation of a government which no longer exists.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner later, that debt is paid.
Good movie. highly recommend to watch
Muss man gesehen haben. Man versetzt sich in die Zeit vom Unglück in Chernobyl und wird in jeder Folge in reine Spannung versetzt
A little bit too WASP/heroic.
The theme of the story is very deep--no matter how good the science was, any system in anywhere must always prevent mistakes from the human. The system who fail to do that will incur a disaster in the future.
Nothing more to add: Truly a masterpiece.
First rate series well worth watching if truth is important to you.
Absolutely perfect miniseries in every way.
Most of the facts about this catastrophe are true. This makes this tv show tragically beautiful.
Speechless thoughtfully sad ... The tragedy super explained
I was thinking about what was the hardest scene to watch and I can't choose only one. But all that mattered.
"Chernobyl" consigue transportarnos a uno de los momentos más trágicos de la historia, para hacernos sentir el desconcierto y la angustia que vivieron. Espeluznante ponerse en la piel de las personas que ni imaginaban que lo peor estaba por llegar...
on my top 10 series for now,,,,best ending ever #TeamLegasov
Shout by IvanBlockedParent2019-05-12T19:56:29Z— updated 2019-05-15T19:03:37Z
Much better than the final season of GOT so far.