Deepwater Horizon
Directed by Peter Berg
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Gina Rodriguez, and John Malkovich
[rating: 3/5]
It would seem the Peter Berg that delivered the hysterical Battleship, one of the funniest disaster films ever made about an alien invasion, has left the building. The cynics would say not a moment too soon but I shall miss him. Brooklyn Decker’s eye-popping assets, those deadly razor balls, and Taylor Kitsch’s lunkhead antics left my sides aching. But, the new Peter Berg, the mature, surprisingly artful Peter Berg, is proving to be an asset. He’s quickly becoming the go-to guy for dramatising real life events that rise and fall on carefully choreographed action set pieces. His Lone Survivor was a thrilling adventure about four soldiers on a mission to capture a Taliban leader in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. Structured like a dark thriller (in what order will these soldiers meet their maker?), Berg beat the odds and delivered the finest war film since Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. Now, with Deepwater Horizon, he’s turned his attention to the biggest environmental accident in United States history when, on April 20 of 2010, the titular oil rig exploded, resulting in over 200 million gallons of petroleum flooding the Gulf of Mexico.
Even for those walking into this uninitiated, it only takes an appearance by John Malkovich to brace us for the worst. What a demonic looking creature he is now. As a BP company man overseeing the proceedings, he is evil incarnate. His eyes are deadlier, his voice even more gravelly, and his approach is even more ruthless. As if it wasn’t bad enough watching him deep throat a gun in In The Line of Fire and destroy a virtuous bride-in-waiting in Dangerous Liaisons, here he nearly wipes out the Mexican coastline. Rather than fan out the story and see that he gets his just desserts, Berg sticks to the facts and Deepwater Horizon is an infinitely more effective film for it. Authenticity is the order of the day here and though, after a fashion, it recalls the overture of Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno, the film is stronger for it. A lot of the dialogue is unintelligible. The personnel of this rig talk fast, and usually in shorthand (there’s a lot if discussion about something called “the bladder effect”) and Berg slyly intercuts with the pressure building down below. Never have oxygen bubbles looked so terrifying. We know a deadly explosion (or two or three or four) is coming and Mark Wahlberg, clearly Berg’s favourite hero (he’s also the lead in his next film Patriots Day), is on hand to, at the last minute, save a life (this must be his least heroic role), while Kurt Russell (a nice turn) as the boss, Mr. Jimmy, gets blown across his bathroom when the explosions kick off. These gentlemen are just three of the one hundred and twenty-six who were on the rig on that fateful day. Eleven died.
The trailer primes us for a basic disaster epic but as it turns out, the film is much more. It opens with a black screen and only the audio from the (real life) investigations that followed the accident and from there we jump into brief character introductions as they arrive on the rig. The camera, on board, is hand held, and Berg plonks us right into the middle of a whole lot of testosterone. They laugh, smirk, and exchange stories. There’s a distinct sense of camaraderie. We’re being manipulated of course, but in the best way. It’s going to be a nightmare battle for survival and we can’t wait. The thing about Deepwater Horizon is, as horrifying as you think it will be, its far worse. You will walk out shaken.
