FUKUSHIMA 50 (2020) REVIEW
Fukushima 50 (2020) Review
Ten years ago the world looked on, as Japan battled to avert a potentially world-changing catastrophe – when, following an earthquake and tsunami, a nuclear reactor started to leak. Hot on the heels of 2019’s acclaimed CHERNOBYL, comes another recreation of a truly chilling moment in history, when the fate of mankind seemed to hang in the balance – or rather, in the hands of the workers at the Japanese power plant, who became known as the ‘Fukushima 50’.
Based on the extraordinary, jaw-dropping book by Ryusho Kadota, On the Brink: The Inside Story of Fukushima Daiichi, the film, directed by Setsurô Wakamatsu (WHITEOUT), is the rival of any Hollywood disaster epic, but at its heart it is a moving and extremely timely human drama about people pulling together in a time of unprecedented crisis.
Ken Watanabe (INCEPTION, GODZILLA) stars as the head of the power plant who must act fast to prevent total destruction, and rally his workers to action while the higher-echelon bureaucrats fail to grasp the enormity of the situation. The film drives home the staggering impact of the incident on Japan, still being felt a decade later, but is a stark reminder that, had it not been for the titular 50, things could have turned out a lot, lot worse.
Being a huge fan of TV series CHERNOBYL (2019) I was expecting FUKUSHIMA 50 to be as gut-wrenching and horrific as that acclaimed, award-winning saga. Unfortunately the team behind FUKUSHIMA 50 have elected to depict such an appalling event in a rather mawkish, sentimental manner rather than opt for a gritty, no-holds-barred take on the catastrophe. Add to that flashbacks that add very little to proceedings and an unhealthy abundance of exposition and this is a league away from what it should have been.
This is a story about lives lost as a consequence of an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear reactor leak so director Setsurô Wakamatsu’s choice to present such horror in a TV-movie-of-the-week fashion simply didn’t work for me. I wanted to be left shaken, appalled and scarred by the experience. If anything it started to bore me and that’s a travesty given the magnitude and sadness of the true events it is depicting.
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