Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Best movie of this year hands down!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

THOMAS JOHNSON – THE BATTLE OF CHERNOBYL – 2006 This film or documentary is interesting because it shows what happened in Chernobyl and the result of it. But the visual effects have often been used in other films, including fictional ones.The cause of the catastrophe is only alluded to at the beginning as the result of the decision to experiment some kind of energy saving or productivity enhancing procedure and that is the human mistake at the origin of the disaster, unluckily with no further specification. The result shows clearly that the experiment had not been studied seriously and particularly modelled or virtualized enough before being performed in real conditions. Then is the mistake the result of a bad decision by some engineer or engineers or is it the result of some bad act or initiative of some operator in the machine this plant was, it is probably impossible to decide. In industrial conditions all new procedure has to be tested over and over again and if it turns sour or dramatic it is the proof it had not been. Look at the result.The film is then very graphic about the dangers the men that are brought up into the disaster area to solve the problem before it becomes even worse and about the heroism of these tens of thousands of men who put their lives at risk to wage a battle against an invisible enemy that strike at once but whose negative effects can only be seen a long time later. We are talking there of hundreds of thousands of men, military personnel, reservists, medical personnel, miners, workers from many needed professions to solve the problem who volunteered or were drafted and who died rapidly or are still dying slowly and who all anyway had and have shortened lives that could no longer be what they should have been.It also shows some consequences on the irradiated population and the frightening deformations the children born from the irradiated parents can show and that cannot be in anyway repaired. The cleaning teams that canvassed the zone and killed all cats, dogs and animals that had been irradiated and were still alive could of course not do the same things with human survivors. The consequences are to be accepted as long lasting and probably irreversible ever or maybe not before fifty or a hundred generations and that would only maybe weaken the effects, not erase them totally because they are genetic.The last point of interest is how the international conference that took place right after the catastrophe, after the completion of the first sarcophagus refused to follow the report presented by the Soviet scientists sent by Gorbachev and decided to minimize the foreseeable consequences, particularly the dangerous effects on the life and health of people. The film insists on how it triggered a real dynamic towards some disarmament, but that is not enough to guarantee the non-use of nuclear weapons one day. Note on the side that France is said to have been the only country that declared its territory was entirely free of fallouts. It takes some foolishness at times to be French.The film of course becomes ideological when some call for the dropping of nuclear power as a source of energy. That was maybe romantic enough in 2006, but in 2016 when fossil polluting fuel and sources of energy are supposed to be reduced in use, if not abandoned, when carbon polluting wood is still used as a source of energy and vastly burnt, it is difficult to reject nuclear energy because it is dangerous if it is used unwisely and recklessly. Cars should have been banned a long time ago for the very same reasons, and these cars and their pollution and accidents kill millions of people every year in the world and their pollution is making urban areas stagnating graveyards for surviving human zombies.We have to really work at another level and have a real world conference on the energetic future of the human species and our planet: climate change is by far too limited. And that human work without pollution in a way or another on the regular daily basis of its regular daily functioning should be solely authorized once and for all, banning all other forms starting with diesel and coal, and then oil and eventually wood. That would seriously improve the situation. Nuclear energy is not really at stake here because its regular functioning that sure has to be improved in security- managing and waste-treatment is not a daily polluter in anyway and can be kept under control if basic security regulations are respected, which was not the case in Fukushima.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

If ever there was a film that documented the horrors of nuclear weapons "The Battle Of Chernobyl" is surely it. What makes this film so potent are the images: photos yes, but also a surprising number of retro news and secret camera footage from the nuclear power plant site and surrounding area, as the catastrophe unfolded in April of 1986, in Ukraine.One of the most haunting components here is the story of Pripyat, a bustling city of almost fifty thousand people in 1986; everyone had to be evacuated. And none of the residents ever returned to live there; the structures remain, but Pripyat is now a ghost town, as are hundreds of small villages in the region, thirty years after the nuclear explosion.One of the big problems with radioactive material is that not only can it be lethal to humans, but it is also invisible, and it remains for a very long time. This film documents the government's secrecy and lies in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy and in later years, and then the denial that now exists among people living in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus that bore the brunt of the radiation fallout.In addition to the images, a narrator (Tim Birkett) describes the events; interviews include comments by Gorbachev and Hans Blix, along with Soviet technical experts and medical personnel that dealt firsthand with the disaster.The Chernobyl apocalypse continues ten years after this film was released. People in Ukraine and Belarus, and even in parts of Western Europe, are still exposed to some radiation. Mercifully, in November, 2016, a giant arched shelter, decades in the making, was slid into place over the original, hastily built, cement and steel sarcophagus, to more adequately contain the still leaking radiation at the plant site.Yet, for several hundreds more years at least, a one thousand square mile area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant will be off-limits to human habitation, a no-mans land of invisible but deadly radioactivity.

I loved the drama and emotive delivery by Tim Birkett, and the script was worthy of Hollywood's finest. What is conveniently glossed over is why the CIA/Mossad agents planted a mini-nuke at Chernobyl to destabilize Russia's on-going collaboration with France to develop their nuclear power program; after all, everyone knows that the low levels of U235 enrichment used in power stations are unable to cause the degree of super-criticality needed in a fission bomb. It was also interesting to learn that "thousands" had died in the immediate aftermath, but that the identities of these people was not acknowledged by the Soviet authorities; perhaps these people didn't really exist... Still, why let the real truth get in the way of a great story.

One of the best documentaries I've ever seen. I can't believe it has only one review. Trust me, this is absolutely a must see. especially for new generations. They need to understand what we risked with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster! The whole Europe could have become inhabitable! The documentary contains rare original footage, and interviews with the people were there in the days of the disaster. The people that contribute, with their heroic sacrifices, to avoid the worst human catastrophe in our history. Absolutely terrifying to discover what we risked, and the fact that, at the times (I live in Italy) we were told almost nothing about the true risks.