So, I Guess Visiting a Museum is Out of the Question?

When traveling through exotic locales, you want to absorb as much as you can of the sights and sounds of whatever place you're visiting.  You want to spend time trying out the cuisine, gazing at historical sites and getting lost for a day in the enchanting atmosphere of a foreign land.  It's difficult to think of tourists wanting to visit the site of a disaster, and yet, that's exactly what a group of young twenty-somethings decide to do.

In director Bradley Parker's Chernobyl Diaries, a new horror film that's severely lacking in horror, what should have been an eerie setting for a good fright is botched by empty-headed characters and a screenplay lacking in creativity.  Chernobyl spewed radiation, and this movie radiates a sense of cheating the audience out of the fun of rocketing out of your seat from a zing of terror.  This is an unfortunate misstep for Oren Peli, the scare-master behind the Paranormal Activity series, who was a producer and writer for this film.

While traveling through Europe, Chris (Jesse McCartney), decides to take his girlfriend, Natalie (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and their friend, Amanda (Devin Kelley), to visit his brother, Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), before heading to Moscow to propose to Natalie.  Once they get to Chris's home, he suggests that they do some "extreme tourism" (I never knew there was such a thing) in the abandoned town of Prypiat, which is next to the Chernobyl nuclear site.  The four of them meet their tour guide, Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), and two other tourists named Zoe (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) and Michael (Nathan Phillips).  After sneaking into Prypiat and spending the day there, they return to their car, only to find that it won't start (of course).  Now, the group will have to stay in Chernobyl until they can get help, and will also realize that the town might not be deserted after all, but a home for mutants deformed by the radiation.

There isn't any point in talking about each character, since they are all daft to a full degree.  They foolishly go into the tour guide's van, which is so sketchy-looking that it's surprising he doesn't offer them any candy while wearing an evil smirk on his face.  All of the characters make so many irrational decisions that it's downright baffling, and it gets to the point where you can't help but think, "They deserve what they get for not having an ounce of common sense." What's worse about these characters is that you don't learn anything about them, so you end up not having any care for them.  All of them are completely interchangeable with other brainless teenagers you see in many horror films.  The most nagging question for this group is, "How does visiting Chernobyl constitute as a fun idea?"  These characters didn't think it all through, obviously.

Except for one good scare, which afterwards seems rather silly, there isn't anything to be frightened about.  We only get very brief glimpses of the monsters.  We only see them from a distance, as a blur or in a one-second close-up as the camera is frantically moving.  Of course, it's always what you don't see is what's scary.  But, the way how the filmmakers build it up, you still think they would give you some sort of payoff in the end.  Well, they don't.  It's all a big rip-off.  From what you do see, the mutants don't look that fearsome anyway.  They mostly look like the monsters from I Am Legend.

The only two things that deserve a little bit of praise are the cinematography, by Morten Soborg, and the atmospherics.  The camerawork uses many long takes to deliver a more realistic and unsettling approach to what we see on film.  There are some neat tricks with the camera and its flows of continuous motion, such as it following the characters while panning in and out of different points of focus, and rotating around the inside of the van as the group converses.  The dreariness of the setting, with its abandoned buildings and lifelessness of the surrounding nature, carry the tragic history of Chernobyl.

Despite the very few noteworthy aspects of the film, the screenplay by Oren Peli, Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke and direction by Bradley Parker don't do anything to make this a memorable horror story. We aren't given any reasons why we should like the characters, and they have as much depth as a kiddie pool.  They don't do anything but run, scream, cry and make brainless decisions, and without any scares worth talking about, Chernobyl Diaries is near worthless.  The tour group made the foolish choice of visiting Chernobyl.  But don't follow their example, and skip this European trip.

Final grade: D