Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes’ on HBO Max, a Sobering Assemblage of Harrowing Archival Footage Capturing a Tragedy

HBO Max documentary Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes arrives three years after the acclaimed Chernobyl miniseries dramatized the on-the-ground horror and political tension occurring in the wake of the fateful nuclear-plant explosion. It also was completed by director James Jones just under the wire – he secured previously classified footage from Ukrainian collaborators only days prior to Russia’s invasion of the former Soviet state, home of the Chernobyl site. The resulting documentary consists entirely of that mostly unseen footage, ranging from joyful scenes of Chernobyl’s prosperity prior to the tragedy, to harrowing moments in the following days, months and years.

CHERNOBYL: THE LOST TAPES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Lost Tapes layers its archival footage with archival and recent interviews with witnesses, local residents and officials – survivors, all of them – who endured the Chernobyl ordeal. The story begins in 1972, when the city was a hopeful place, a symbol of optimism for the Soviet Union. The nuclear plant provided young people – the city’s average age was 26 – with good jobs and the opportunity to raise happy families. In scenes that smack of state propaganda, Chernobyl was on track to be “the biggest power station on Earth,” and the city was so robust, the maternity ward was overfilled and it was a blueprint for more “atomic cities” to be built throughout Russia. Faced with the question, officials assured everyone that the plant, a shining star of Russian engineering, would never explode, and everyone believed it.

From here, the horrors pile up exponentially. We hear audio of an emergency call to firefighters: 1:26 a.m., April 26, 1986. A female interviewee says she looked out her window and saw a mushroom cloud billowing over the plant. A plant engineer woke to the sound of his alarm clock at 6 a.m. and got on the bus to go to work; he wasn’t aware of the accident until he saw the wreckage from the bus window. He reported to his station, and saw the men from the overnight shift. They were exhausted. One was deathly pale. The effects of the immense radiation had already had extreme effects on their physical state. Our narrator shook hands with his co-workers and later learned that merely doing so intensified the radiation exposure to the right side of his body.

Meanwhile, life went on as usual in Chernobyl. Children went to school and played on playgrounds. Mothers pushed their baby strollers down the sidewalk. There was no communication from government officials, no sense of urgency, no instructions for people to stay indoors and reduce their radiation exposure. Thirty-six hours went by before buses arrived to evacuate people. Information began to trickle out via international news reports; radioactive particles had drifted into Scandinavia. The Soviet government’s plan to keep a lid on it, contain the reactor and report the successful containment was failing, but they stuck to it. In nearby Kyiv, people filled the streets for a May Day parade, not knowing the city was irradiated at 50 times the usual amount. Ten days after the initial explosion, the reactor was still burning.

The footage gets more disturbing: Flashes of light indicating massive amounts of nuclear radiation mar images of people on the Chernobyl streets two days after the explosion. Plant workers suffering in hospital beds, their flayed skin oozing with large sores. A helicopter, flying over the plant to drop sand and boron into the burning reactor, accidentally tags a crane and crashes. Miners, unaware of the dangerous levels of radiation they’re absorbing, work endlessly, digging beneath the plant to encase the reactor in concrete.

Five months later, the radiation still hasn’t been contained, and cleanup is still occurring. After a robot malfunctions, the Russian army orders men known as “liquidators” to don haphazard, ineffective protective gear, scale the building and shovel intensely radioactive wreckage into the pit. They didn’t know or didn’t believe the radiation would hurt them; eighty percent of them would die soon thereafter. In the following months and years, piglets, calves and human children would be born with cancer or significant grotesque mutations, and we see images of them – too many of them. But the government continued to sweep the truth under the rug. The rampant illness among the citizenry was psychological, officials insisted – “Radiophobia,” they called it. Within five years of the Chernobyl incident, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Lost Tapes features some of the most remarkable, revealing unseen archival footage since Apollo 11.

Performance Worth Watching: Lyudmila Ihnatenko, the wife of a firefighter, provides a deeply affecting emotional component to the film with her first-person narration. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because that’s who Jessie Buckley played in Chernobyl – the pregnant woman who visited her husband in the radiation ward and suffered much tragedy afterward.

Memorable Dialogue: Opening narration, from a Russian voice: “In the Soviet Union, the relationship with truth was complicated. … The explosion at Chernobyl would destroy so much. The pride of the Soviet regime would destroy the rest.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes is grim and sobering, and essential for that very reason. Jones unearthed exceptional footage, taken from such dangerous areas that the people behind the camera surely suffered as much as the people in front of it. And so many of these images are difficult to endure, capturing gruesome, unvarnished truth. Some of the footage is fascinating, capturing life in the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s – families cavort on a sunny beach and fill bustling Chernobyl streets, countering our Western ideas about miserable Russians in bread lines. But for the most part, the doc is grueling tragedy, and any more than the 96 minutes Jones assembles here might be too much.

The expertly assembled timeline of events and the gritty visual details are accompanied by a key narrative component – the crass, inept, infuriating response to the explosion by Soviet officials, led by then-President Mikhail Gorbachev. In one crushing moment, Ihnatenko shares how she and other spouses of firefighters met with the President, who said her husband would be hailed a hero and buried in Moscow, then urged her to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The construction of the plant didn’t include a containment unit in case of an explosion, an act of bungling Soviet hubris and overconfidence; Gorbachev and co. clung to that narrative, launching a misinformation campaign so the country could save face on the international political stage, at the expense of its suffering citizens. Jones extrapolates directly to the inevitable crumbling of the Soviet regime, firing an arrow directly at the heart of a big lie, and any resemblance to events in other countries surely isn’t coincidental.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s a difficult watch, but Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes is one of the year’s best documentaries.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes on HBO Max