The others weren’t too sure about this trip, but Paul
(Brother 1, the aforementioned convincing idiot) talked them into it. All that
remains at Chernobyl is a radioactive ghost town. What danger could there be?
For a while, the trip goes just fine for these tourists. The guide reassures
them that they won’t be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation since they’ll
only be staying an hour or two. There are guards at a checkpoint that won’t let
them in. That’s kind of weird. Even weirder, the guide drives the group in through
the back way, down a rundown, woodsy path. Still, though, nothing too
dangerous, they suppose. They walk around the ghost town. They see some modern
day ruins. They take some pictures. They joke around. They look off into the
distance and marvel at the huge nuclear reactor that now sits unused. It’s
nothing out of the ordinary.
First time director Bradley Parker does some nice work with
silence and the mundane, a trick he no doubt picked up from producer and
co-writer Oren Peli, whose incredibly low-budget massive hit Paranormal Activity helped to ignite a
new craze of found-footage films. (Funnily enough, the other writers are Carey
and Shane Van Dyke, who wrote the direct-to-DVD Paranormal Entity, no relation to Peli’s hit series.) This one
starts off with found footage in a smeary, consumer-grade digital montage of
London and Paris, but luckily drops that conceit just before the title card,
trading it in for wobbling hand-held camerawork of a more traditional kind.
For the longest time, the twenty-somethings just fumble
through their tour, getting freaked out a little from time to time, but nothing
they can’t handle. Most of the suspense comes from the way the blonde’s shirt
has only half of the buttons fastened properly. But then cell phone reception
is bad, eventually nonexistent, and batteries die and nightfall is approaching.
Things get ominous real quick, but it’s hard to feel too bad about a bunch of barely developed, empty-headed, gullible characters
who walk knowingly past obvious warning signs. (Travel tip: if you go to a
dangerous place in a foreign country with a stranger, tell someone else where
you’re going and when you’ll be back. Or, you know, don’t go.)
Somehow, the van’s wiring has been cut and so they’re stranded.
Should they stay in the van and wait for sunrise? Things go bump in the night
and slowly the group decides to split up and then someone inevitably
disappears. The next day, splitting up once more, they go looking for the
missing member of their tour group. Bad move. I’ll give you one guess as to who
talks the group into most of the decisions they make. You can probably also
guess that characters get injured or go missing with predictable results. Some
are found dead, others alive, but either way there’s a lot of the movie spent
wandering around an abandoned town shouting “Uri!” or “Natalie!” or “Chris!”
over and over again. Of course they’re not alone here. Someone or something is
clearly menacing them and it’s not just the loud dogs that are good for a “Boo!”
or two. It turns out the place is haunted (or is that inhabited?) by people who
like to stand in the background or sometimes jump out of shadows and grab at
you for no real reason. They must know they’re not real characters or real
specters or zombies or even much of a tangible threat. They’re just set
dressing.
Obviously this is not the most respectful way to treat an
all-too-real disaster, but the filmmakers don’t even have the guts to use their
exploitative premise to exploit much of anything. The first half or so of the
movie makes some effective use of the setting, the way the slowly crumbling
buildings of the town are flash-frozen in time, eerily still and quiet. When a
character hears something rattling around down the hall, it’s spooky. There shouldn’t
be anyone there. When someone goes to investigate and the camera stays with
those left behind, that’s genuinely creepy. As more of the characters disappear
and I found myself not really caring one way or the other, the movie stopped
being even slightly scary.
By the time we see more and more of the creeps limping out
of the shadows, what little tension that has accrued slips away. And let’s not
even talk about the ending, which is unbelievably, eye-rollingly predictable,
but which I won’t reveal here because, who knows, maybe you’ll still see it at
some point. I guess the way the movie ends is no more generic than the rest of
it, though. This isn’t a movie out to subvert cliché, or to do the same old
thing in an inventive way. It’s a movie that’s just interested in checking all
the boxes, getting the obvious done and getting out. The movie’s not good
enough to recommend or bad enough to hate. It just is.
No comments:
Post a Comment