Shock and awe on one of the most amazing sets ever built
Deepwater Horizon 12A cert, 108 mins Dir Peter Berg Starring Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Kate Hudson, Dylan O’Brien, Gina Rodriguez
Explaining how an oil rig works to a mainstream cinema audience is no small matter. Explaining how one might fail – as the Deepwater Horizon did, horrendously, six years ago, in America’s largest-ever environmental disaster – takes even more hard labour. The film of the same name sets about it like homework, quite literally. In the opening scenes, an engineer called Mike Williams, played with rock-solid everyman earnestness by Mark Wahlberg, is standing around the kitchen table with his wife (a swell Kate Hudson), while their daughter practises a class presentation about What Daddy Does.
She describes the pressure in the layer of crushed dinosaurs at the bottom of the ocean – the stuff everyone’s looking to siphon up – by shaking a coke can, and then stabbing a metal straw into its base. It’s such an on-the-nose illustration you’re almost tempted to roll your eyes, but it works for one reason: the film captures a flavour of blue-collar breakfast rituals that feels credible and honest. In his best film since 2004’s Texas sports drama Friday Night Lights, Peter Berg aces the crucial task of ensuring there’s actual weight to these lives.
The other task – the mammoth one, in a film of risky budgetary exorbitance – is getting us on that rig in a way that feels real. Building an 85 per cent scale model of the thing is the movie’s masterstroke. This isn’t a soundstage bedecked with matte paintings pretending it’s an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s more or less an oil rig – certainly one of the most remarkable sets ever built.
We get a flashy helicopter flyby, as Wahlberg’s Mike touches down on the day everything went haywire. You allow the film this blockbustery touch – in fact, you allow almost all of them. The dumbed-down showmanship of Berg’s ill-fated Battleship connects when it has this real subject to work with. Sobriety, necessarily, tempers the bombast, while the livid photography and devastating sound design have “for your Oscar consideration” written all over them.
The next question: what the hell happened? This script isn’t shy of pointing the finger at BP executives, who had leased Deepwater and twitched with impatience about getting it operational. The second you see John Malkovich, as a pursedlipped, bullying boss called Don Vidrine, you know the film has picked its villain: when safety tests come up with baffling anomalies about pressure differences in the drill pipes, he cherrypicks the results that don’t look so bad. His Cajun accent is curious, but watching him wobble in a daze through geysers of filth is mesmerising. Kurt Russell, meanwhile, is on beautifully gruff form as a veteran foreman who has to tread carefully: the prickly diplomacy between the guys manning this operation and the suits running the show is as much to blame as anything.
When communication breaks down, the mud flies, and then the oil does, and then it explodes, in a series of harrowing lurches, which hit you with lumbar-bruising fissile force. Berg’s favourite subject – he last conscripted Wahlberg on an Afghan battlefield in 2013’s Lone Survivor – is heroism at the brink, but the rescue efforts here aren’t pushed to outsize or sentimental extremes. They’re exhausted, lastditch gestures, overawed by the pitiless inferno behind them, which is exactly right. Deepwater Horizon might pitch itself as some uplifting testament to noble survival against the odds, but this is pure marketing – a silver lining which this lethal cloud of angry prehistoric debris never had.