Remember watching The Cabin in the Woods last month and appreciating its thorough examination of why many horror movie tropes have become outdated and irrelevant? Well, Bradley Parker's Chernobyl Diaries was pretty much the exact opposite of that. Where Cabin in the Woods so successfully deconstructed the genre, Chernobyl decides to double down on those cliches and depict them in the least interesting way possible.
The initial concept is actually kind of intriguing, albeit conventional. The story centers on six tourists who hire an extreme tour guide named Uri to take them through the abandoned city of Pripyat, the former home to the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. But as one might expect, everything goes to hell when they discover that wild, radiated animals aren't the only danger left by the disaster.
Without giving too much away, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the film is that the characters are incredibly stupid. Have we learned nothing from horror movies past? When someone tells you to stay in the van, you If there's an urgency to run, you don't stop to talk about what the plan is -- for the love of God, you keep running! And above all else, no matter what you do, DON'T SPLIT UP, right? Unfortunately for all the victims involved, Chernobyl Diaries lets every single one of these mistakes happen at least once, if not several times. And by the end of it, you don't even feel sorry for these morons.
Of course, just because every character has mush for brains doesn't necessarily mean the film's a failure. With enough thrills, chills and kills, almost any horror movie can at least hold your attention. But again, this is another area where Chernobyl Diaries doesn't deliver. What few jumps and scares there are almost never follow through on anything worthwhile. And when something actually does happen to one of the characters, we're forced to cut back to the others hearing distant screams or dangers that they -- and as a result, don't actually get to see. It's just plain discourteous.
In fact, one of the film's only redeeming qualities is that it wasn't shot in the style of found footage. While a lot of the action is still subjected to shaky cam and obscured imagery, most of the movie isn't nauseating to watch. On the contrary, many of the earlier locales are actually quite nice looking. The Pripyat environments are indeed eerie and moody, and it's almost a shame they weren't featured in a better flick. However, pretty much all of that rich atmosphere is squandered by a slow-moving first act that clumsily meanders its way to the brass tacks.
All in all, Chernobyl Diaries embodies everything that's wrong with modern-day horror movies -- it's dull, cheap and irritating. The problem isn't in its premise or even its dimwitted characters; it's ultimately the film's lackluster execution that makes it a failure. The story never builds to the resolution you're hoping for, and as with many films of this ilk, it annoyingly introduces another round of unanswered questions in the final minutes of its "screw you" ending. Unless you're absolutely jonesing for a meager handful of frights, steer clear of this underwhelming romp.
Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/26/chernobyl-diaries-review
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