CHERNOBYL DIARIES

Director: Bradley Parker
Screenplay: Oren Peli and Shane and Carey van Dyke
Starring: Jesse McCartney, Devin Kelley
Experience the fallout

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For a horror film goer who is looking for some mild peril and cheap thrills, The Chernobyl Diaries might tick some boxes in a perfunctory kind of way. It is not without tension or scares. But for an aspiring screenwriter like me, it is a frustrating piece principally because it's a produced film with a cinema release and reasonable publicity campaign that almost completely eschews one of the fundamental aspects of a modern film, namely the third act.

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Diaries treads on well-worn steps to begin with. Americans backpacking in Europe. Deserted towns devastated by nuclear disaster. Radioactive mutants.

Seen it, seen it and seen it again.



But despite this, film does engage earlier on. The character introductions are snappy and we cut to the Chernobyl bit quickly. This is good because it's no secret that's where everyone is heading - the clue is in the rather odd title. The post catalyst scenes have an imposing atmosphere and the act one break is a nice set piece with 7 people stuck in a van.

Up to that point, so far so good in a mediocre sort of way.

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It wouldn't be fair to say things go awry from the moment Paul, Amanda, Michael and Zoe return to find the van containing Chris and Natalie is gone but it's definitely a milestone. To me this is the obvious midpoint. The characters can't just walk away any more. The stakes go higher. Yet from here the narrative launches in to set piece after set piece of the characters running around darkened buildings being prayed on by unseen mutants. If I can get past the recycling of the films own scenes, I can't understand why just at the point when the characters reach their lowest point, the story kills them all off.

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I can't find the character development! Where is it?!
What's more there is no well-defined protagonist. Paul is responsible for the characters being there in the first place. He's reckless and we know he has let his brother down many times before. Natural arc there? Possibly, yet Paul just becomes increasingly pathetic as the film progresses. He has no plan, no fight back, no idea what to do. And then having seemingly escaped to live another day he gets himself unnecessarily shot in a final glorious act of being a reckless twat. This guy can speak the native tongue, so he understands what the guys holding the guns are saying yet he still doesn't do it. What did he learn in the story...?

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So Amanda it must be. She has the most screen time along with Paul and she lives longest. But what is her story here? We learn she's recently broken up with her boyfriend. She likes taking photos. And... nope, that's it. But if we analyse the structure of the narrative through the prism of her as the protagonist, where is her mid-point? Where is her all is lost moment? The latter appears to be when Natalie is found and she has to be coaxed into going on but the other elements just aren't there, because her character is just not nailed down.

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But although paper thin, Amanda is the strongest character, the one who is brave and consistently the one to take action. In the last throes of the script she saves Paul proving she is also the strongest physically. But this is where the story stops for her. She is carted off and thrown into a cell to be killed by the mutants. The writers seem to have taken their main character to her lowest ebb and then just killed her. Bizarre.

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I can't help but feel that Diaries would have been improved by another ten pages or so. There is no pay off for the characters let alone the audience. The Hills Have Eyes is more complete because it allows it's protagonists to take some action of their own. Diaries' flimsy protagonists are all just kill fodder.

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So what? It delivers some scares, has good production values and was never going to win Oscars. Yet I can't help but feel a little pissed off. Co-writer Oren Peli is either subverting the rules in search of his "old style" or he either doesn't know or doesn't care about basic screenwriting "rules". Obviously he has a leg up being who he is, but for those of us trying to break in to the game using the rule book, Diaries is a frustrating example of modern horror.