Review The
Chernobyl Diaries, directed by Brad Parker from a story idea by Oren Peli (who also produced and co-wrote) had promise as a horror-
movie idea: Six featherbrained American tourists hire a Ukrainian “extreme tourism” guide to take them on a day
trip to
the ruins of Pripyat, the workers’ town that was abandoned after the
1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The combination of “final girl” slasher
movie with contemporary political allegory could have made for a
bracing genre scramble, a discount version of Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the
Woods. And Peli, the creator of the sui generis Paranormal Activity
franchise, is an interesting figure on the horror landscape. Like them
or not (I do, mostly), the Paranormal movies have a distinct directorial
voice: They’re claustrophobic and incrementally
scary,
low on gore but high on suspense. Those movies commit fully to the
conceit that every image should be “found footage” filmed by the
characters themselves, and find clever ways to work within that
technical constraint—like the
nifty
shot in Paranormal Activity 3 when a character mounts a home video
camera on the engine of a rotating fan, creating a repetitive horizontal
pan of the room as scary shit goes down on both sides.
That kind
of cinematic inventiveness is direly absent from Chernobyl Diaries,
which also contains about as much political allegory as a box of
Goobers. Better titled Six Dumbasses in Search of a Clue, the movie
opens in party-town Kiev, where Chris (
Jesse
McCartney) is visiting his older brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski),
who’s a student there. Chris has a serious girlfriend, Natalie (Olivia
Taylor Dudley), and Paul has just started dating Amanda (Devin Kelley).
In addition to looking like Gap catalog models, all four seem
well-heeled and without a care in the world—now who’s up for a whirlwind
tour of the smoldering corpse of the world’s worst nuclear disaster?
Even
after they meet up with Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), the beefy, evasive
tour guide who assures them they’ll be in the hot zone too short a time
to run any risk from the radiation, this foursome’s not-a-good-idea
radar doesn’t go off. Nor does that of Michael (Nathan Phillips) or Zoe
(Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), a pair of European backpackers who join them for
the Chernobyl jaunt.
Uri drives them to the eerily silent ghost
town of Pripyat, where, after finagling his way past the border check,
he lets the group explore a few of the crumbling barracks and take
smiling cellphone pictures of themselves against the backdrop of the
nearby reactor. After a couple of red-herring jump scares that are more
annoying than frightening, Uri’s van breaks down, and the cognitively
challenged protagonists begin to grasp their situation: They’re stranded
in Carcinogen-town, without cellphone service, as night falls and the
radioactive
wolves begin to howl.
There
actually are radioactive wolves, and other species affected by the
Chernobyl disaster, living and adapting in fascinating ways in the woods
now retaking the real-life site—a fact which, had it entered into the
story, could have made for an interesting combination of
evolutionary-science thriller and pick-‘em-off horror film, another
potentially good movie this isn’t. Instead of mashing up genres, Parker
goes straight to mashing up people, throwing the characters one by one
to the mercy of mutant wolves and (at least so it seems) possibly mutant
humans as well.
Parker’s minimalism does make for a handful of
legitimately scary moments. He uses no music, except for an occasional
pulse of thudding percussion, and gets a fair amount of mileage out of
simple things-that-go-bump-in-the-night suspense (though when the gore
comes in the second half, it’s plenty gruesome). But any further craft
lavished on this screenplay would be wasted: Less than a half-hour in,
you already don’t care which, if any, of these one-dimensional
characters survive the onslaught. You might actively root for their
collective demise, if you could rouse yourself to care
one way or the other. Go gallivanting in Chernobyl and you get what you pay for, nimrods.
Chernobyl
activist groups have protested this movie’s flippant association of
those affected by the real-life disaster with homicidal flesh-eating
freaks. I don’t know whether to applaud these efforts—the movie is,
without question, in atrociously poor taste—or to assure those offended
that, however icky the existence of Chernobyl Diaries may be, it doesn’t
matter. Unlike the grave consequences of the awful event they survived,
this movie will disappear from the earth in no time at all.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/05/chernobyl_diaries_reviewed.html
Director : Bradley Parker
Writers : Oren Peli, Carey Van Dyke
Release : 24 May 2012 (USA)
Genres : Horror
Stars : Jesse McCartney, Jonathan Sadowski, Olivia Dudley
www.imdb.comFull Movie Here
