HBO Chernobyl miniseries discussion

Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich is a must-read if the issues surrounding the disaster interest you. It's sad as hell.

What I love about this show it is not just about the disaster itself, but also the serious flaws with the communist government. It makes it clear that it wasn't just the disaster itself that made this disaster so devastating, but also the culture that led to terrible decision making in the aftermath.

The end of episode two was one of the scariest things I've seen on television. It played right into several of my fears.

I really enjoyed it so far. The darkish shade of the shots really does it for me. Although I enjoyed every scene, I felt like they are moving the story very slowly. Like, they are stretching out lot of incidents but it doesn't feel like it until we try to recap what happened in the last episode.
Also, can anyone suggest similar movies/series which are based on disaster events?

I just finished the series. Spoilers ahead.

I thought it was incredibly well done. They did a great job of compressing a whole lot into five episodes without any of them feeling rushed. I also thought it was wonderfully shot. Everything had a sort of austere beauty to it. I don't have the film vocabulary to really analyze it, but everything from the sets, to the color, to the lighting, to the framing of certain scenes was very visually compelling.

I've read Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl (which is excellent) and Grigori Medvedev The Truth About Chernobyl (which is also excellent but was a bit too technical for me to truly appreciate), and the show felt like it captured pieces of both of those. Alexievich's book captures the on-the-ground, individual perspectives of the everday people affected and at times feels like dystopian fiction despite being uncomfortably real. Medvedev's book, meanwhile, captured a lot of the higher-level procedural and bureaucratic issues that the series also depicted.

As someone without a strong background or understanding of the operation of nuclear reactors (as I would imagine most are), I greatly appreciated Legasov's explanation and visual aid during the last episode. It made for an easy, simple to understand rundown of what occurred, better than any else I've seen. It was also appropriately dramatic for the final episode, closing the central mystery that the show opens in the first episode. Very compelling, and it was but one of the series' many scenes of comparable heft and skill. The killing of the dogs in episode 4 was particularly difficult to watch, as was the excursion into the tunnels underneath the reactor at the end of episode 2--not to mention the constant unbreaking tension of radiation exposure and its horrific effects on those most exposed.

I also thought the series, while not particularly anvilicious, can be applied to modern society in a lot of different ways should you choose to do so. The show's portrayal of powerful people ignoring scientific understanding and warnings could be used as a metaphor for climate change, while the show's theme that there is a real truth no matter what lies you tell could apply to contemporary online and political discourse, where so much is to be distrusted.

Overall I thought it was an excellent series. Apparently the writer did a podcast where he discussed adapting the show from his source material, so I'm looking forward to diving into that and learning more about what was based in truth and was created just for the show (e.g. Khomyuk's character).