TV Reviews : Gripping Drama of Chernobyl, Five Years Later

Those who have grown smug about Chernobyl and relegated the nightmare to yesterday’s news will be slapped awake by “Chernobyl: The Final Warning.”

The dramatization of the disaster stars Jon Voight in his TV-movie debut (premiering today on the TNT cable channel at 5 p.m., with repeat broadcasts at 7, 9 and 11 p.m.). The two-hour film was shot last summer in the Soviet Union, including inside a nuclear power plant at Kursk, east of Chernobyl.

Arriving five years to the month after the nuclear meltdown in the farmland of the northern Ukraine, “Chernobyl” is a substantial docudrama, reawakening viewers to the global spread of the radiation--as one burn victim calls it, “the circle of poison.”

The production, which will be distributed shortly in the Soviet Union and which received invaluable Soviet assistance, is propelled by a strong sense of place, jolting special effects and surprisingly solid characterization, given the genre of the disaster movie. The moments leading up to the explosion inside the reactor itself and the depiction of the gruesome, cancerous aftermath among those under treatment in a Moscow hospital are tautly dramatized by director Anthony Page and scenarist Ernest Kinoy.

Voight, with his characteristic warmth and fervor, plays the real-life UCLA bone marrow transplant specialist Dr. Robert Gale, whose skills, technology and equipment played a major role in cutting through Soviet medical bureaucracy once the Soviets owned up to what had happened. Crucially, Gale’s errand of mercy is made possible by Armand Hammer, whose legacy as a power broker endures in the crusty persona of Jason Robards.

British actress Sammi Davis is an earthbound presence as a pregnant Chernobyl village wife widowed by the disaster. On the Russian-speaking side, two leading Soviet actors--Vladimir Troshin as Gorbachev and Yuri Petrov as an affable Soviet lackey--enrich the drama.

The production (based on the book by Gale and Thomas Hauser) is an estimable achievement and answers what happened after Chernobyl better than anything to date. The L.A. Theatre Center in 1987 dramatized Chernobyl with a Russian play, “Sarcophagus,” but it was dry and arid compared to this film version.