As I watched this I thought of another similarly themed HBO show, "Chernobyl", which left my viewing of "Fukushima" to be left wanting. Not a fair comparison, as one was a mini-series, maybe, but nonetheless I stand by it. This film felt more like a story of the various people involved in the event, and less about the science or even the politics. I was not interested in the personal stories, wanting more about how the disaster happened, how the meltdowns transpired, how TEPCO and the Japanese government and regulatory agencies failed, and how the culture of Japan made any structural corrections beforehand nearly impossible to consider, let alone implement. A lot of US involvement, which tracks considering our massive military presence in Japan (which I still cannot understand, this being half a century after WWII...), and the fact the reactors were US designs. Still, nothing was developed and most of the information was spotty at best. There was little sense of urgency or danger, no ability by the producers to elicit much emotion at all, honestly. They barely touch on Hiroshima (not at all on the near-immediate follow-u bombing of Nagasaki) and move right into how quickly Japan moved into nuclear energy, an idea which would seem preposterous in a country that was the victim of the only two nuclear attacks on innocent civilians in history. The meltdown is almost seen as a third natural disaster, even though it was entirely avoidable and entirely the fault of humans, not any sort of act of god or weather phenomenon. Properly built with adequate safety precautions and there would never have been any issue at Fukushima, since the earthquake killed no one at the plant, and only two people died as a result of the tsunami. The documentary just slides over this, almost as if the Japanese culture of silence took over the production too. A lot of shallow coverage that never gets better after the footage of the earthquake or tsunami, which happens at the beginning, obviously. Rather average for a documentary, especially with all the camera footage they seemed to have available throughout the 90 minutes of runtime, which could have at least been used to better effect emotionally if they planned to skimp on actual data presentation.