A bit of a delayed review here but the woman and I went and saw the midnight showing of Chernobyl Diaries on the 25th and here's a quick little review:
Both my girlfriend and I are huge Chernobyl nuts, we have spent many a nights watching documentaries, reading up on it and we are planning on visiting the Pripyat grounds one day, so we were both stoked to have a Hollywood movie come out about the disaster. We did however go into the movie with zero expectations, and we thought that at the very least we would get some cool shots of the grounds and that was it, so basically we went in with no real bias or opinion, we just wanted to see some cool shots.
For those who haven't looked too much into it, Chernobyl Diaries tracks a group of "extreme tourists" who go onto the Pripyat grounds and shit hits the fan. I hate spoiler reviews so I won't give too much information on what all happens but basically it's a Hills Have Eyes / Zombie type setup, so the "horror" of the movie is basically shit jumping out at you and tons of suspenseful sections. And aside from a few glimpses you never truly get to see the "monster(s)" (I am being intentionally vague here) so if you're not a fan of that you might hate this, personally I think not seeing the bad guy in a movie makes it scarier, so I dug this. But basically the tourists are slowly picked off whilst running through the darkened remains of Pripyat and the Chernobyl plant, and the footage is seen through a combination of video cameras (Peli's typical work) and regular cinematic shooting.
So to break it down, there are four components: Scare quality, Plot quality, Character quality, and Artistic quality.
Scare Quality: Like Oren Peli's Paranormal work, the spooks come from sudden jumps and built up suspense, and this movie has plenty of that. And granted some of the scenes were predictable, that didn't make it any less spooky in a dark theater. There were a good 8-10 jump scenes, some of which made me almost shit my pants, and some suspense moments where you're like "JUST FUCKING RUN AWAY!", so it definitely has plenty of good creep moments. Is it the scariest movie ever made? No. Is it a fun scary movie to see? Definitely.
Plot Quality: When it comes to all movies, shit is never logical, and like 99.9% of all cinema, Chernobyl Diaries falls victim to this too. Like most horror flicks there are plenty of times the characters could have made things better but chose to dive deeper into the story and while it makes the movie thicker it just gets annoying after awhile. Again this is common, so it's not a huge nag, it's just a note. The overall plot though is pretty decent, you get a good introduction of the characters so you can pick who you like and hate, you get plenty of "footage" of the Pripyat grounds (note: the movie wasn't filmed there", and then it leads you into people dying and creepies jumping out at you, and the movie ends on a full note, so you cliff-hanger haters should enjoy this. For a plot it's not bad, it could have used a MUCH deeper historical approach, but this isn't a history movie, it's a horror movie. However I do question how the characters were able to deal with the radiation levels the way they did, but I ain't no doctor.
Character Quality: Going into Chernobyl Diaries I had never heard of anyone from the cast, much less seen them in movies. Thanks to my TV show obsessed girlfriend I got a quick rundown of some of the actors but essentially I went into it not knowing or liking/disliking anyone. It didn't take long however for me to straight up hate Jesse McCartney, both as a person and as a character and I was rooting for him to die before the credits even came. As with almost every horror movie the women were annoying but Olivia Dudley's character was fine. Dimitri Diatchenko and Nathan Phillips were both funny and essential in my eyes, and Jon Sadowski was a 50/50 kind of character, half the time I liked his character's cool and cocky attitude but the other half he was just a little bitch who needed to be iced quick. One last thing on Jon, as an actor he doesn't click well with me, he seemed like he was laughing through most of the serious parts of the movie, and perhaps the guy has a terrible cry face, but it just didn't seem believable to me half the time. Overall the cast could have been better, but we could have been given 10 Jesse McCartneys, so it could have been worse.
Artistic Quality: Now for the thing I looked forward to the most: the city shots. There are scene interludes that are absolutely amazing, showing the city in both light and day settings covered in fog and light sources. Granted these shots are only a few seconds of the overall movie but I loved them, shame they were almost all CGI (assuming). As for the ground shots themselves, when the characters are walking around the grounds it appears to look absolutely legit, but according to Jesse McCartney the actors never stepped foot in Pripyat, so I am assuming it is all CGI and trick photography. The grounds, real or fake, are thoroughly shown in the movie: the infamous Ferris wheel, the apartment complexes, the Chernobyl plant and even the control room inside the plant itself. There are also shots that I had never seen depicted before as the characters run throughout the complex, but I am not 100% sure these exist or if they were just made up by the writers. Overall it's well shot and they make sure to show plenty of cool footage and parts of the overall Pripyat landscape, so as far as I am concerned I got my $8 worth on that alone.
With all that said I guess it's time for complaints: I can easily see why many people dislike this movie from a moral standpoint, I can only imagine the backlash if some European film maker made a movie about Katrina or something, so I don't really know how I feel about it all from a moral perspective, hell I'm just here for the cool footage of Pripyat. Other complaints I've read center around how it's not scary and how it's predictable and how the only thing this movie has going for it is it's location, and while I agree 100% with the location (if this wasn't Chernobyl based I wouldn't have rushed to see it) I don't see any difference between the scare quality of this movie and the other horror movies of today: shit jumps out and you jump. So singling this one out from the rest of modern day popular horror movies is a little unfair, because it fits the usual mold and expectations of today. But aside from these complaints I have nothing really against Chernobyl Diaries, it's nothing ground breaking, it's not the scariest movie but it'll make you jump a few times and it has a cool background setting; but odds are this movie will only appeal to big Chernobyl disaster nuts like myself.
SHIT MOVIE RATING: GOOD
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