“Chernobyl,” a five-part miniseries starting Monday on HBO (in coproduction with British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.
Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.
Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.
From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.
Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the show trial of the plant’s supervisors as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.
Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.
Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a backroom by the KGB.
The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistleblower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.
The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation?)
In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.
At a time when the documentary miniseries is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.