Chernobyl Diaries

Chernobyl Diaries has been out for a few weeks now and despite not having watched the trailer I felt compelled to see it. 

PLOT:  A group of travellers set off with their extreme tour guide Uri to visit the town of Pripyat which has been abandoned since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  The group find themselves stranded and as night falls they realise that they are not alone.............dun dun dun  END PLOT

There isn’t anything new or original with regards to the plot of Chernobyl Diaries but the set up in the abandoned town was much better than expected.  My friend guessed the ending of the film before the first act ended so we were hardly shocked by the finale.

If you are able ignore the stupidity of the characters enough to go with the flow then there are parts of Chernobyl Diaries which are quite tense but after the scare involving the angry speed-crawling robotic baby it lost its momentum.

Snarling dogs leaping angrily at car windows will always make me jump however the residents of Pripyat either lurked in the dark or appeared to be made of cheap CGI.  I appreciate the point of the Chernobyl Diaries is the fear of the unknown but their reveal was very anticlimactic.

The shaky camera work was very annoying, especially at the beginning of the film, although it settled down.  I don’t mind hand-held cameras but if one of the characters isn’t filming I don’t see the point.

The characters are all clichés with their sole purpose being to die, although given the number of deaths; the vast majority of the violence took place off screen or was surprisingly tame.

The cast are all unremarkable and aside from a few exaggerated wide-eyed moments of terror you can’t fault them too much.

Chernobyl Diaries is not a good film and I can’t bring myself to say that I disliked it.  It gets a 5/10.  It is a decent but forgettable 86mins spent in the cinema but nothing more than that.