MovieChat Forums > La terre outragée (2012) Discussion > The engineer

The engineer

posted 9 years ago by Doodlebuger
1 reply | jump to latest

I found the character of Anya and Valery (the young boy) well developed. Their motivations and concerns are quite clear, and the description of the consequences of the catastrophe on them is the main reason the film is good.
The engineer, on the other hand, is totally incomprehensible to me. He is an engineer at the plant. He is one of the first to understand the scale of the "incident". By the way, how does he know "two idiots at the plant have done something silly" ? No one knew the cause of the incident as close to it as that. But apart from this minor hitch in the dialogue, what happens to him ? OK he buys umbrellas to protect people from radioactive rain, a futile act but all he can think of. He does not answer the phone ringing in the middle of the night, so does he refuse to go to the plant and deal with the accident as he certainly should do ? Then next time we see him he is half lost in a train, not knowing no more trains go to Pripiat. So what happened to him in these ten years ? Was he jailed for not showing up for duty ? Did he become mad and wasinterned ? How come his wife never received any news ? How come he does not know most refugees are in Stavutich ?
All other characters are somehow explained. He is not. And I found this a major flaw in this film, which justifies my note of 6/10. Especially since he appears as one of the three main protagonists.
Anybody knows better ?

[–] henrimaine 8 years ago

Yes, the engineer was somewhat of a strange character. Why was he not in contact with his family? Why did he go around writing down people's names? An easy explanation would be that he had just lost his mind during the catastrophe. A more complex alternative would be that he perhaps had been hiding from police/militia, because he apparently refused to participate in the power plant reparations in 1986. So he basically had "deserted" from his governmental job and therefore could not contact his family after they had been relocated to a new town. Well, but now I remember that his photo was on that "wall of dead heroes" that his family visited. I doubt they would put a photo of a deserter on such wall. So, he probably became just a pit messed up during the accident, due to guilt, or something like that.