The Railway Men: A Chernobyl-Like Drama That Hits Hard

One of the biggest man-made disasters is the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion, which came out as a limited series on HBO, titled Chernobyl, and it has hit almost all the viewers hard. Treading in a similar path, now an Indian filmmaker has carved the story of India’s biggest industrial disaster, the Union Carbide factory gas leak disaster in Bhopal, as a web series for Netflix. Here’s an interesting talk about it.

Titled “The Railway Men”, director Shiv Rawail explored the situations and times of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy that killed more than 15,000 people (as per estimates) after the plant leaked Methyl Isocynaite on the night of December 2-3. This four-part limited series, which has an hour runtime for each, deals with how a station master (Kay Kay Menon) and the then Railway GM Rathi Panday (R Madhavan) averted Gorakhpur express coming to Bhopal, such that some deaths could be avoided. As the director takes into the world of Union Carbide Factory, how wrongdoings happened there, and how the gas leaked killed many, blinded many and caused many other damages, somewhere it melts even the hardest hearts.

While the series is slow in parts, surely the emotional drama hits anyone hard and movie lovers would surely feel like watching another Chernobyl like series only. Some hard-hitting dialogues in “The Railway Men” are something that refuses to go away from the brain, while some scenes are so cruel, like the post-mortem scene, that we can’t even watch it without shedding tears. Released a couple of days ago, the series is trending at No.1 position on Netflix right now.