Adam Amin

This is a Japanese mini-series that displays the events just before and in the days after the terrible accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The series lets us follow different key persons with different areas of responsibility, including the Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan (but in the series, his name has been changed to Azuma) and other important people in the Japanese company TEPCO. However, the main character is the nuclear engineer Masao Yoshida. The series consists of eight episodes and progresses slowly. The dramaturgy is built more on emotional outbursts and long artistic pauses, rather than technically skilled special effects. Consistent throughout the drama, the focus is on the facial expressions and emotional outbursts of responsible managers when the employees present new figures on the rising pressure and temperature in the reactor tank. The Prime Minister is portrayed here as a grim and tight-lipped man who all too easily bursts into new outbursts of rage. The series actually gives as much a picture of Japanese culture as of the nuclear accident itself. It's easy to reckon that the director and the screenwriters probably were somewhat critical of the political leadership in Japan during this time and how they attended to the accident. Japan is known for being strongly characterized by hierarchical systems, but also by great professional pride, something that I think emerges very clearly in the series. All the workers are responsible for their specific work area and do so with pride, but when something goes wrong, there are also high demands for accountability. However, this tends to get a bit tiresome in the series, as it seems more like the managers are yelling and scolding at the workers, instead of trying to solve the problem in a constructive manner. Maybe that's also how it happened in reality, and if so, the director has managed to stage this very skillfully. There are many technical abbreviations in the series, making it a bit difficult for a viewer (who is not very familiar with nuclear technology) to follow. However, the technical details also make the series more authentic. The series may not have been intended to be a documentary, but it would have been interesting if somehow the various events in the accident were explained in a more educational way to the viewer. The series is in no way as good as the series about Chernobyl, but I think it's still worth watching. I think it could be shortened to three or four episodes instead of eight, as I believe you can tell the same story at a faster pace without the risk of excluding any details, either about the accident itself or the workers' experiences and hardships.

A typical example of a "femme fatal thriller". Sharon Stone shows in this movie that she is an extraordinarily talented actress. Michael Douglas excels too. Some critics claim that movies with many sex scenes often have a thin story, but that's not the case with Basic Instinct. The dialogues and characters are interesting and the thrill is building up at just the right pace.