The Science-Fiction of Chernobyl Diaries

Barely, marginally a Sci-Fi flick. The only claim it has is radioactive cannibal mutants living in the remains of Prypiat. All this may be a spoiler, but the trailer shows it off already.

Now for actual spoilers. It is left a little unclear but the main issue for the six main characters (other than the radiation in the shadow of Chernobyl reactors) are wild radioactive dogs and mutants.

For the animals, packs of wild starving dogs make sense, but there seem to be carnivorous fish. Whether piranha, barracuda, or a radioactive mutant fish, they have a taste for flesh. Between the dogs, fish, bear, and people there is a large sense of hunger. And everything appears to be flesh-eating.

My only experience with a radioactive landscape is playing Fallout 3. In it you have a constant Geiger Counter that goes wild whenever you approach water. That never comes into the movie, but at least that might explain the mutant fish. The guide, Yuri, even carelessly plays in a stream to scare the other six.

As for the radioactive mutant cannibal humans, there seem to be two kinds. The super-hungry feral humans that run and claw at you, then there are “clever” humanoids that stalk and set traps. There’s even a child mutant used to distract the group, while a larger one sneaks up and snatches one of the women.

Yuri claims he’s been bringing people to the city of Prypiat for five years. He’s experienced enough to bring a gun but appears not to know about flesh eating mutants. Couple that with the Doctors at the end of the movie who talk about escaped patients or something and the whole answer seems to be human “lab rats” gone wrong.

Nothing is ever explained more than that and must be inferred from the movie. The gate guards to Prypiat turn back the tourists, surprising Yuri. This sounds like a recent issue. The mutants are basically flesh-eating humans which display some form of deceptive hunting practices. Most of the time it seems inconsistent why some act smart and some act dumb.

All this could be chalked up to be poor writing. At least by the end the remaining characters deal with acute radiation sickness, about the only science that is plausible in the story. One of the women has a digital camera, and she uses it frequently. I know radiation effects standard film cameras, but I don’t know what it does to digital images or optics or CCD chips, if anything at all. It would have been nice if the movie brought it up.