You have a choice. You can either take a trip to
historic Moscow to see the Kremlin, the Bolshoi, heck, even Gorky Park, or you can go to Chernobyl to see a
bunch of 1970s highrise towers that will give you cancer… Surely the answer to
this can be found in the dictionary under “no brainer.” Sadly for the
characters in The Chernobyl Diaries, they chose poorly.
Here’s the low down (stop me if any of this sounds
familiar) a group of American kids are travelling across Europe having the time
of their lives. They’re good looking, young and carefree. Chris (Jesse
McCartney), his girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley) and Amanda (Devin Kelley)
are set to continue their adventure from Kiev where they are visiting Chris’s
reckless brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), to Moscow. However Paul decides it
would be like…really cool, to go on an extreme tourism excursion to the
abandoned city of Pripyat instead, where in 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
took place. Ultimately they decide to go and together with two other extreme
backpacking bozos, and Uri (the worst tour guide in history) sneak into the
ruined town. After spending the day looking at tower blocks, rusty bits of
metal and mutant fish (yep,) the group discover that something has destroyed
the wires in their van and they are stuck with no way out in the
not-so-deserted-town.
Except that there is a way out. There are ways out all
over the place in this film and you keep wondering why they never just, you
know, walk out? Ok so there are a few things in the way, mutant fish being one
of them, mutant dogs another and more worryingly, mutant thalidomide babies
(once again, yep) but the film slows down to what can only be described as a
tedious pace whilst the hapless characters run about giving the script time to
bump people off.
It must be said that I began baying for the blood of all
of the characters involved apart from the remarkable Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) whose dialogue kept me in stitches, whether
it was meant to or not (“This is a well organized tour…I have beef jerky.”) The
rest are a bunch of self-indulgent idiots who should all be nominated for The
Darwin Awards. The script makes some lukewarm attempts at character development
but ultimately they are more lifeless than the mutant creatures attacking them
and the central emotions of the film can be boiled down to “Oh, my brother! Oh
my God! Oh, my eyes!”
Ultimately
this film just leaves you feeling remarkably disappointed and not remotely
scared. After the success of Paranormal
Activity it seemed that the world of horror had a great new talent in the
form of Oren Peli but you have to wonder how talented someone is after going so
spectacularly wrong with this venture. The shots of the abandoned Pripyat are fantastically
eerie and visually impressive and for a moment I actually thought that the film
might be able to pick itself up and rise from the ashes (no Chernobyl pun
intended.) It is such a shame to see a wonderful location go to waste and for
no one to notice the horror potential that the long corridors, rusty Ferris
wheels and forests could muster. Instead they took the easy way out and went
with Creature Feature 101.
I
suppose everyone really will be wondering if this film is offensive to the
hundreds of people who have eventually died due to the nuclear fallout from the
disaster. In my honest opinion, I don’t really think that it is. You can
actually go and visit Chernobyl now and if this film drives tourism to an area
that is in financial difficulties then quite frankly that is a good thing.
Still
there are a few things I have learnt from this film: don’t listen to survival
advice from annoying, Kiwi backpackers, the smell of Uri’s beef jerky will
probably attract any mutant dog for 20 miles towards you, and if anyone invites
you to go to the radioactive version of Tower Hamlets, just say no. The poster
declares that “they said nothing survived” but something did. It’s called a
terrible script.
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