Los Angeles Times

A disaster film taps into outrage

‘Deepwater Horizon’ from Peter Berg is a nightmaris­h salute to heroes and survivors.

- JUSTIN CHANG FILM CRITIC

“Deepwater Horizon,” a mighty cinematic conflagrat­ion from director Peter Berg, revisits the tragic events of April 20, 2010, when a Transocean-owned, British Petroleum-leased oil drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 crew members and precipitat­ing one of the worst environmen­tal disasters in American history.

Ripped from the headlines but largely shorn of context, the movie is both a sobering memorial to the fallen and a harrowing chronicle of survival, anchored by Mark Wahlberg’s performanc­e as a blue-collar hero thrust into the jaws of a horrifying man-made catastroph­e.

If that sounds at all familiar, it’s because it more or less sums up Berg ’s previous film, “Lone Survivor,” in which Wahlberg played a U.S. Navy SEAL trapped with his comrades in post9/11 Afghanista­n. There’s every reason to suspect the descriptio­n might also apply to “Patriots Day,” Berg and Wahlberg’s upcoming drama about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

It’s a curious thing, thinking about real-world tragedy in terms of blockbuste­r templates and franchise potential (if there’s ever a DVD box set, I expect it to be titled “The Wahl-Berg Trilogy” and decorated with

American flags). And it shouldn’t necessaril­y reassure us that, for sheer visceral and emotional satisfacti­on, the template largely works.

In both this film and his previous one, Berg has met the challenges of the assignment with blunt sincerity, striking verisimili­tude and a shrewd understand­ing of his talents and limitation­s. And in the case of “Deepwater Horizon,” which runs a swift, frenzied 107 minutes, he seems to have perfected, or at least streamline­d, his formula.

Swift, no-nonsense and pummelingl­y intense, this is the big-budget Hollywood disaster flick on a CrossFit regimen and a Paleo diet — a hellish cataclysm that never risks overstayin­g its welcome.

Adapting the New York Times’ exhaustive report on the Deepwater Horizon’s final hours, Matthew Michael Carnahan (who wrote Berg’s “The Kingdom”) and Matthew Sand run an admirably tight narrative ship. Mike Williams (Wahlberg), a Transocean electronic­s technician, gets barely a moment’s domestic tranquilit­y with his wife (Kate Hudson) and daughter before heading out for a three-week stint on the rig.

He and his fellow crew mates — the other one we get to know is Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez), a 23year-old dynamic positionin­g officer and the rig’s lone female employee — are helicopter­ed out to the Deepwater Horizon, which is stationed some 41 miles off Louisiana.

The master of the rig is Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell), whose insistence on safety and demand for much-needed repairs have earned him the adoration of his crew and the scorn of the Big Oil reps on board.

When Mr. Jimmy declares, “This rig is broken,” the unambiguou­sly villainous BP executive Don Vidrine (John Malkovich) shoots back that they’re too far behind schedule (43 days) and too far over budget ($50 million) to worry about cutting corners. Clearly never having seen “Titanic,” he orders the crew to proceed full steam ahead with a series of high-pressure drilling tests that will lead to the blowout.

The contrast between the two factions — the good workers operating the rig versus the greedy fat cats calling the shots — is simplistic­ally drawn and, by all accounts, completely, infuriatin­gly accurate. And the actors have been cast along such plain, easy-to-read lines — Wahlberg with his sturdy good-guy affect, Russell with his righteousl­y clenched jaw, Malkovich with his insinuatin­g Louisiana drawl — that on a gut level, you know exactly what’s happening in “Deepwater Horizon” even when you understand absolutely nothing that’s happening in “Deepwater Horizon.”

The script is a gloriously impenetrab­le thicket of maritime lingo. At times, Berg and his actors will make a token effort to educate the laypeople in the audience on the mechanics of pressure levels and blowout preventers.

Yet all the authentics­ounding science talk is clarified only intermitte­ntly — and at times, it’s further confused — by the film’s cutaways to the rig’s gurgling internal machinery, or to the ominous rumblings on the ocean floor 5,200 feet below. (The movie’s entire first half is like one long refrain of “That doesn’t sound good.”)

But once mud begins to seep up through the floor of the rig, and the pipes burst and release slushy, gaseous geysers of oil, “Deepwater Horizon” stops giving the slightest damn whether you’ve been following along or not; it picks you up and propels you forward with hurtling, unstoppabl­e force.

The characters’ incomprehe­nsion merges with your own as the front-line workers are assailed by shrapnel and thrown about like rag dolls. Russell, who gets second billing but is easily the movie’s MVP, finds himself trapped in the scariest shower scene since “Psycho.” And that’s all before the gas ignites and the fireballs erupt, sending the survivors toward the lifeboats as the derrick and soon the entire rig are engulfed in flames. There will be blood, for sure.

The final inferno, belching fire and smoke into the night sky, is nightmaris­h and surreal, and it’s filmed with inky beauty by cinematogr­apher Enrique Chediak, who favors an energetic but never excessivel­y shaky camera throughout. Berg has decisively left the frivolity of “Battleship” behind him, and his sense of film craft evinces a basic respect for the medium and his real-life subjects alike.

You don’t get the sense, watching “Deepwater Horizon,” that its perils have been pumped up for effect, or that the production has been gunked up with too much CGI. (That the filmmakers went to the trouble of building a massive, 85%to-scale replica of the rig surely accounts for much of the movie’s realistic feel.)

Berg’s talents have always tended toward the experienti­al rather than the analytical. “Deepwater Horizon” will answer few of your questions about America’s crippling oil dependency or the ecological and economic fallout of the BP spill. (For all that, see Margaret Brown’s excellent 2014 documentar­y, “The Great Invisible.”)

What Berg brings to the movie is a fundamenta­l respect for process and for the sight of good men (and one good woman) hard at work. “Deepwater Horizon” may lack the unsentimen­tal, egalitaria­n perspectiv­e of Paul Greengrass’ 9/11 drama “United 93,” but it has something of that movie’s in-themoment, matter-of-fact compassion. It recognizes that people caught up in extreme circumstan­ces are often exalted not through sentimenta­l speeches and force gestures but through the profession­alism and sense of duty they evince in their darkest moments.

At the same time, the movie duly acknowledg­es that not everyone on board acted so nobly, and while the four years of legal proceeding­s against BP are left offscreen, the company’s guilt and its destructiv­e negligence are stamped in every frame.

If Berg doesn’t go especially deep here, he nonetheles­s strikes a raw nerve of outrage. “Deepwater Horizon’s” shock-and-awe spectacle is over before you realize it, but its anger burns, clarifies and lingers.

 ?? David Lee Lionsgate ?? MARK WAHLBERG struggles to survive an oil-rig catastroph­e in Peter Berg’s “Deepwater Horizon.”
David Lee Lionsgate MARK WAHLBERG struggles to survive an oil-rig catastroph­e in Peter Berg’s “Deepwater Horizon.”
 ?? David Lee Lionsgate ?? KATE HUDSON, left, Stella Allen and Mark Wahlberg in a family scene from “Deep Horizon.”
David Lee Lionsgate KATE HUDSON, left, Stella Allen and Mark Wahlberg in a family scene from “Deep Horizon.”

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