There’s been no time since the dawn of The Nuclear Age, that a fair number of people haven’t had a very strong suspicion that it could be our Tower of Babel. We knew it could be our undoing, not just individually but as a species, because there was something fundamentally strange about splitting elements of creation from their most basic form. You drill down that small and you’re playing God, and since we are created in His image, and he had already destroyed mankind or most of it before, it would probably happen again. It spoke to our most primal superstitions. We knew without any evidence yet that it was bigger than us.

Our relationship with science, technology and medicine remains sketchy at best though. Our doubts are evidenced in as many common conspiracy theories in 2020 as they are in our books and films. Some people won’t vaccinate their children because they’ve convinced themselves based on very few details that it’s a dangerous practice. Some go further and claim the WHO is trying to decimate the Third World with vaccines. People doubt that climate change is manmade because they don’t want to believe we have that power and they’re not willing to compromise creature comforts to correct it. This very day you can go online and read any number of tinfoil helmet conspiracies about the origins of COVID-19. The fear isn’t new though and that is reflected in our films and literature. We’ve been talking for more than half a decade about radiation, toxic waste, bio-warfare and lately, artificial intelligence. We’ve been talking endlessly across time about Armageddon. It always goes back to the relationship between Man and God, and what we should be messing with and what should be left alone. All the early zombie films, by the way, either suggest or come right out and say that humans are in one way or another responsible for their own demise.

I do still believe that it would be nuclear power, or splitting the atom, that would be our final undoing. I’m a product of the 80s though, a time when we were all talking about how that could and would happen, whether it would be a meltdown like China Crisis or a full-scale nuclear holocaust. It was perfectly reasonable to believe when you had President Ronald Reagan talking matter of factly on television that our first strike capabilities would keep our casualty rate down to about 30 percent. I was born right before the Cuban Missile Crisis. I grew up with daily talks about non-proliferation and/or disarmament treaties. Armageddon was part of the daily discourse for the first three decades of my life. The two close calls (closer for some than for others) were disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979 and then Chernobyl in 1986 — and we will probably never know whole story with either or the impact on human life. People don’t talk much about Fukushima wich was only 2011 but it fell out of the news pretty quickly here in the Western World. I’m sure it’s still a mess but they’re not going to report on it while the news media are often owned by the same people building new reactors. Talk of nuclear disaster is so much less now than it was 30 years ago. You hear about it every so often in the context of terrorism or North Korea but it seems like people don’t see it as a real possibility now. There are other (other, not bigger) fish to fry.

I queued up Chernobyl Diaries because it looked like it fell within my current obsession with mutant zombies, and not because it was a Nuclear Age thriller. The synopsis:

“A group of young tourists (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelley), hoping for an adventure off the beaten path, hires an extreme-tour guide. In spite of warnings, the tour guide takes the sightseers to the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, once home to workers at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant but abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. After briefly exploring the ghost town, the tourists find themselves stranded — and worse, they are not alone.”

Before I go any further, let me just say that this is totally a trip I would take. Fear of being irradiated until my bawbag glows might have prevented a 28 year old version of me but at 58, and it’s not that I’m foolish, it wouldn’t take me a second to sign up. There’s so much less to lose at 58 and I would jump at a chance to go so far off the beaten path. In short, I am potentially the first dead bastard in any horror film. Extreme tourism indeed. I would be out there. I can say, however, that as the King of Social Distancing my stupidity probably wouldn’t harm anyone else. And there would be really cool shit to see in the meantime, perhaps some brutalist architecture. Worst case scenario we put the brute and brutal in brutalist! Insert smiley face here.

The only way to give a spoiler alert for Chernobyl Diaries would be to give away who lives and who dies, or to explain exactly what the threat in Pripyat is. There’s no point in doing that. There’s almost no point at all. The story is weak. The characters are dreadfully underdeveloped. You almost get a chance to care about one of them enough that it might matter if they make it, but not quite. The cinematography and setting/location are unspectacular and the film is mostly shot in the dark. Literally everything remains unknown or obscured. You don’t even get a good view of whatever or whomever it is that is responsible for any harm done.

So what’s left? What’s interesting about this film?

For starters it came out a year after Fukishima melted down in Japan. It violates the unwritten “too soon” codes of film-making. Or maybe it was the perfect timing. Maybe it’s exactly what the world needed, as reporting from Japan fell off pretty quickly. That wasn’t the Japanese government. That was our own media.

Next, it preserves the mystery, not just for the sake of a sequel. There was little enough reason for a first film here let alone a sequel. Then again, the same could be said for Hostel, and how many of those are we on now? We still have no comprehensive knowledge of the depth of the impact of these disasters. We are nowhere near knowing the possibilities of the damage.

Finally, what more might we know without a concentrated shutdown of the flow of information from governments. It’s easy enough to point fingers at the Russians or Chinese for creating blanket silence on events like Chernobyl or COVID-19, but consider that our military is still denying the longterm effects of above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada. We have very little information on other disease outbreaks or toxic leaks and such. Bhopal, India is still largely a secret, much to the delight of Union Carbide shareholders I’m sure. With all the real life cover-ups, compounded by cover-ups portrayed in popular film/culture it’s small wonder that otherwise well-educated parents wont vaccinate their young ones for measles.

Still, there isn’t enough to warrant watching this movie. Suffice to say I took one for the team here. It had all the seed elements of a worthwhile horror/sci-fi mash-up but similar to the Russian automotive industry, it never got up to speed for a world market with more efficient, flashier product. I’ll probably still go in for anything within this theme/genre.