Left Behind

LEFT BEHIND AKA AFTER CHERNOBYL AKA GHOSTS OF CHERNOBYL is a supernatural found footage horror film about a group of young people who inadvertently end up in the Chernobyl area and get terrorized by a supernatural entity. This story is bookended by that of an urban explorer who found the footage of this group and presents it to us.

I had just watched the thematically very similar THE CHERNOBYL DIARIES, and while that movie was a massive disappointment, compared to this, it is a veritable masterwork.

There are problems here on so many levels:

1. Character exposition: the movie does not properly explain how all the members of the group are related to each other. Also, there seems to be a point of conflict regarding the uncle of one of them that is never clarified.

2. Dialogue: it appears the directors went for the improvisation approach. As a result we get the expected banal, aimless dialogue to which is added a ton of shouting and yelling and pointless verbal sparring. It also rendered all group members thoroughly unlikable.

3. Acting: Generally not good, but then all that shouting turned these characters into one-notes, and therefore I could not tell whether the limited range was a problem with mainly with the acting or the dialogue.

I did notice that the actor who played "Tom" was head and shoulders above everyone else. I was then surprised to find out that he was Russian and that he had passed away 2 years before the release of the movie.

4. Story: Okay, so this is Chernobyl with a supernatural twist. It could have worked, but there was still so much unexplained, especially with all the ghosts other than the girl. And why was there a ghost train?? Why on earth did the urbex guy decide to go back after he had just watched the footage? How did the old footage from a generation before get mixed in with this footage?

5. Cinematography: this is the best aspect of this film, but still problematic. The film-makers decided to give fairly long preview flashes every once in a while. Thus, we see the antagonist early on, before the horror even begins, and the chance for a creepy buildup until the reveal is thrown away.

What a pity that neither this nor DIARIES managed to take advantage of the fantastic setting. Maybe the third time will be the charm.

This is bad. Terrible acting, stupid premise... there is no way people can "accidentally wander" anywhere near the exclusion zone. "Kate" is so bloody annoying I was hoping something would happen to her, but I couldn't sit through the crapfest long enough to find out.

At first glance, Ghosts of Chernobyl (aka After Chernobyl) seems like just another run of the mill found footage movie. But then the end credits roll and they had some behind the scenes footage playing - and low and behold, they actually had a crew on this!

Believe it or not, there was what looked to be 5 crew members plus the cast actually on-site in Pripyat during the day and night to film, which is impressive seeing as there are obviously some heavy restrictions on the Exclusion Zone. They had a full makeup for the ghost and even a steadicam operator.

So how did we get this bland rehash of a movie?

First off, one has to be slightly lenient towards the fact a non-English crew shot an English language film, but that can only go so far. The plot is absurd (no one can accidentally wander into Chernobyl without hiking 10+ miles). We have direct lifts from other FF movies, an annoying cast, and bad CGI.

The scenes filmed at the groups van are so blurry and low rez they look to be filmed on an iPhone 4. However, once the group arrives to the abandoned city, things pick up a bit. Hounded by a mysterious bloody ghost, the group tries to figure out who she is and where they are at.

Seriously, none of them know what Chernobyl is. Sadly though, such a vapid group of young people honestly might not, but when the audience already knows where they are at, it gets annoying really fast hearing them constantly go "why was this town abandoned?".

Which leads to the biggest issue. They filmed in Chernobyl, yet apart from a handful of shots, it could have been filmed in any blown out abandoned building. The nighttime scenes are wasted with such a low light you don't see any scope, and the day scenes are largely shot in generic abandoned spots. I would half suspect they only were allowed one day and night to film at the actual location with the rushed feel of the shots and editing, but then again, the bts footage shows otherwise.

There is a decent concept behind this, but as yet no one has been able to deliver something worthwhile, as Chernobyl Diaries is just as bad as this.

It's not at all difficult to express why this movie was so terribly bad. Everything about it from the very beginning to the very end was absolutely horrendously awful. The supposed "Americans" spoke with such poorly done American accents that they sounded drunk or on some kind of downers. It was actually pathetic. The actors screamed and yelled more than anything, which was beyond annoying! Truly one of the worst portrayals of Americans I have ever seen performed by foreign actors. There was no story, and the scenes made no sense. Why the characters got themselves into the situations they were in was never explained and it probably couldn't be. This film was obviously just a way to pit down Americans by people who quite simply hate them. The film makers might as well have just made a movie called "Americans are ignorant, drunk, and angry people." It would have been more entertaining than this 1 hour and 24 minute long statement of disgust. What an awful movie. Nothing about it was good.

There are a lot of ways in which this movie fails, but I want to point out this one in particular. Conflict between characters can be interesting when there are interesting points of view behind the conflict. This film, on the other hand, doesn't understand the use of conflict: the characters all just hate each other and bicker constantly. The movie tries to tell us these are friends and romantic partners, but what it shows us is a group of people that hate each other's guts, and not in an interesting way. Their bickering never advances the plot; it's usually just about whether they'll keep walking or stop for the night, and there's no difference between these options that we, as audience members, should care about.

Without a particularly interesting premise or compelling characters, this flaw sinks the movie from "nothing of interest" to "actually grating".