Oil rig blows up, but viewers left cold
“Deepwater Horizon” is a dramatic feature about the oil rig explosion in April 2010, which created an ecological calamity in the Gulf of Mexico. The film doesn’t deal with the 87 days it took to finally plug the hole in the sea floor, nor with the colossal damage to wildlife, property and the local economies. Its focus is very specific — the events leading up to the explosion, the explosion itself and the struggle of people aboard the rig to survive.
So the movie is an opportunity to dig in and concentrate on 24 tense and perilous hours. The watery setting, the page from recent history and the compressed time frame might lead audiences to expect something like “Captain Phillips.” But unlike that earlier film, “Deepwater Horizon” doesn’t engage the emotions in an urgent way. It has scale, spectacle and a cast of good actors who seem to believe in what they’re doing. But the movie springs to life only in spurts.
It’s as if director Peter Berg made the movie for a specific minority of viewers who already know absolutely everything about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. If you’re one of those people, this movie can serve as an illustration of events and sights you’ve previously only imagined.
Berg takes the audience into the thick of it, so that the oil is gushing and flames are shooting up right there in close-up. There’s little sense of the grand scheme, but there is a very good sense of what it must have been like to be in the midst of the horror, and sometimes that’s effective.
Most of the time, however, it’s not. Instead, we’re often left wondering what exactly is exploding and why it’s exploding. We see lots of action, but the handheld camera, quick cutting and reliance on close-ups make it difficult to see how the action relates to the overall picture. And action divorced from context, in which it’s often not clear what is happening or whom it’s happening to, isn’t exciting or meaningful. It’s just commotion.
Deepwater Horizon was an oil rig that floated on the water and was available for lease by oil companies. The heroes of the film are the men who work the rig and have respect for the natural forces they’re trying to tap and contain. Most of their story is told through the eyes of Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), the rig’s chief electronics technician, who is shown on the morning of the disaster canoodling with his wife (Kate Hudson) and helping his daughter with her homework.
The villains are the BP executives who think they can cut costs and save time by stinting on safety procedures, because they either don’t care about their workers or really don’t understand the risks. Or maybe a little of both. The corporate culture of BP is embodied by an appropriately smug and impassive John Malkovich, who keeps smiling and telling the boss of the Deepwater Horizon (Kurt Russell) not to worry, that everything is fine.
But the characters don’t really come through. The film is too programmatic and obvious. There’s the opening designed to make us care about Williams and his family. There’s the little-do-they-know intro, in which the hints that something might go wrong are obvious only in hindsight. And then there’s the disaster, which starts slow and gets worse and worse until it’s utter madness and horror.
It’s only that last part — the mechanics of the disaster itself — that captures director Peter Berg’s interest, and it’s there that he captures ours, too. It’s as if the Earth were exploding upward, so that there are flames, oil gushes and something else you might not expect, flying projectiles shooting everywhere, unmoored pieces of concrete and metal. So in addition to the explosions and the fires, being on that rig was like being on the wrong side of a rifle range. The movie conveys this, not just through visuals but through a sound design that roars and clangs and unsettles.
Yet even then, the depiction is so close-up and shaky, so quick and undefined, that it’s hard to feel involved. Berg’s whole strategy may have been to throw us deep into the action, but the irony is, he ends up creating distance. He keeps us on the outside.