Chernobyl Diaries: Bad Script, Decently Made

Oren Peli's projects—past, present, and upcoming—lead me to believe that his brainstorming sessions involve throwing darts at 3×5 cards pinned to a wall, with each card showing either a region or a location. After Paranormal Activity and its tentacles made Peli Horror's low-budget savior, the darts decreed "Amazon" and "Boat" and thus, The River was born and dispatched after one season.

The most recent round of darts apparently landed on "Russia" and "Abandoned Nuclear Facility," and so we get Chernobyl Diaries. Though not shot in the quintessential Peli “found footage” style—the film opens with a self-aware tease that it will be—it still goes about the same business of documenting naive young adults messing with forces they don't understand and filming it with a degree of verisimilitude (read: shaky cameras navigating erratically through poorly lit destinations).

The young adults in this case are longtime couple Chris (Jesse McCartney) and Natalie (Olivia Dudley), who are taking a European vacation with their recently single friend Amanda (Devin Kelley). Their final stop along the way is Kiev, where Chris's bachelor brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) intends to show them a wild time in Moscow.

But you know what'd be more fun than Moscow? Exploring the abandoned city of Pripyat, where the families of the workers of Chernobyl lived until the city's reactor went, well, Chernobyl. "Extreme exploring," Paul calls it. Going along with the suggestion that no rational human being would go along with, the group decides to visit the city still saturated with radiation. They are guided by Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), a former Russian Special Forces soldier, and joined by another couple, Michael (Nathan Phillips) and Zoe (Ingrid BolsøBerdal).

With the sun high in the sky, the group explores the vast urban decay of Pripyat. Towering and ominous, the buildings of the former neighborhood are specters in their own right, eerie reminders of the sudden and unpleasant deaths that took place there with the promise of something imminent and foreboding. It is a vast expanse scored by complete silence, where memories of man have become relics, where "nature has reclaimed its rightful place." When night falls, it becomes clear how wrong it is for these people to be in nature's place.

A sabotaged van means the gang can't drive out and since they’re 12 miles from the nearest government check point, walking is out of the question as well. Noises begin to echo out in the dark. "It sounds like a baby," one of them says. "It's not a baby," Uri responds furtively. He goes out to investigate. Paul and Chris join him. The rest of the group waits with bated breath. Soon, the brothers return, but only the brothers and only one of whom can walk on his own. Chris, with his splintered and crippled leg, keeps babbling that "they got him" and whoever "they" are, there's a lot of them.

If Chernobyl Diaries is successful at all in scaring you, it's due to a combination of the location’s pregnant atmosphere and director Bradley Parker's restraint. When it comes to “found footage” films, or spiritual cousins of “found footage” films like Chernobyl Diaries, the tension is primarily derived from what you don't see, both in how little of the creatures/entities you see and how long it takes until you see them. Filmmakers know that the imagination will always be more frightening than the movie magic they can conjure, and for a large portion of this film viewers will have to rely heavily on their imagination to decide what's making the noises out in the night, what's lingering just around the corner, and what's coming down the hallway.

On the commentary track to Aliens, James Cameron mentions how 20th Century Fox executives were unhappy with him for taking so long to actually get to anything having to do with the aliens. That's not to say that Chernobyl Diaries holds a candle to that action masterpiece, but Parker shares an approach with Cameron in how he holds off on anything other than cheap, knee-jerk scares until well into the film, taking the time to instead get to know the characters and linger in the breathtaking beauty and tragedy of the ghostly Pripyat before really trying to scare us. When he finally does, the scares are of the cookie-cutter variety, but it's encouraging to see a director who values the build-up of stakes and tension over the standard quick-and-dirty.

If Parker were a director of any less talent, the film would entirely resemble straight-to-DVD dross. A lot of that has to do with an unremarkable script written by Peli, and Shane and Cary Van Dyke. If the names of the brothers ring a bell, it's probably because you spend way too much time subjecting yourself to cinematic atrocities like Titanic II, Transmorphers: Fall of Man, and The Day the Earth Stopped, which are just some of the titles for which the Van Dykes can claim responsibility. Why Peli as producer looked at those two and thought, "well, they need more work," is a mystery that we will probably never understand, but you get what you pay for and if Peli paid for a mediocre horror film, then Chernobyl Diaries delivers.