I liked the movie rather than not.
Its main feature is eclecticity, so characteristic of the works of the late 80s - early 90s. In the realities of that time, the creators of paintings could just walk the streets with a camera and shoot people on the streets, before that it would have been grace-filled types!
But here we have not just a film, but a film about the Chernobyl tragedy. Plus, filmed for sponsorship money, that's important!
It turned out oddly well. For all the modesty of the budget and funds, the real effect of the presence that April day near the burning reactor was obtained. We managed to convey the heroism of the actions of the liquidators - doctors, firefighters, military. Absolutely stunning scenes of the evacuation of Pripyat - footage of a dog running behind a bus, a scene with a woman with a stroller bridge - remain in memory for a long time.
The hero of this segment of the film is doctor Tolik, at the call of his heart, attached to the tail of a column traveling lightly to the reactor, and received a huge dose of radiation one of the first.
Parallel to the main storyline are several more. This is the life of journalist Zhuravlev and his family, who were in Kiev at that time. I must say that there is a melodramatic chewing of intrafamily rehearsals, frankly causing yawning.
Then - a young couple who played a wedding on that very ill-fated day and so inappropriately went to rest in the forests near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. With all the consequences. Beautiful work by Alexei Serebryakov and Marina Mogilevskaya! Indeed, this is the highlight of the picture, especially struck the final scene in the church, the Easter service under the supervision of soldiers in gas masks and chemical protection suits.
The fates of several more people are shown, and all this is seasoned with a somewhat grotesque, but not stupid, criticism of the actions of the authorities, who without a pointer from above are able to turn a blind eye to the most obvious facts and “fix all the planned 20 weddings”, no matter what, even though radioactive fallout from the sky will fall.
In this regard, the final scene of hoisting a red flag on the reactor looks somewhat pretentious, but again the balance is observed and shooting the landscape draws attention away from this senseless act.
Now for the minuses. They're not that global, but they are. If the mentioned Santa Barbara from the personal life of the protagonist can still somehow be tolerated, then a number of shots (tiny episodes, sometimes per second!) are frankly made for the sponsor to expose these strannih russkih and the surrounding reality in some absolutely schizophrenic way. I’m talking about the footage of a car accident at the beginning of the film, the scene of a person falling into a crowd outside the stadium, and of course, the episode at the checkpoint, where a couple have sex at the barbed wire fence among people rushing for the fence. This is not a metaphor or an art house remark. This is the delusion of a stew mare - neither to the village nor to the city. Greetings to investors.
To the question of whether to watch this movie, I answer: "Worth it."