Deepwater Horizon isn’t really an action-adventure film, or a disaster movie. Not quite. Rather, it’s a horror film. It’s about a struggle for survival against an implacable, relentless foe. Or foes, really: the pent up energy of billions of barrels of oil beneath the ocean floor on the one hand; callous corporations on the other.
Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) are headed to another stint on the Deepwater Horizon, a floating fortress extracting oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. They kiss their loved ones goodbye and hop on a helicopter with Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell). Joining the trio of rig workers are two BP execs on hand to check out the drilling process—and present Harrell with the company’s highest safety award.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Because, as we all know, the Deepwater Horizon is destined to explode. (Spoiler alert, I guess.) Well, not destined to. It only gets to the boiling point because a cadre of BP execs led by Messers. Vidrine (John Malkovich) and Kaluza (Brad Leland) are pushing to get the oil pumping ASAP, safety tests be damned. There’s money to be made elsewhere and this show is 43 days late in getting started. Time is most definitely money—and BP doesn’t like wasting it on things like "concrete tests" or "inspections."
That disregard leads to the disaster that dominated the news in 2010, one that dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the gulf and cost 11 men their lives. That we all know it is coming makes the scenes directly ahead of the explosion almost unbearably tense: shuddering pipes and rushing liquids sound like wild animals. Nature is as unstoppable as any slasher flick villain, and just as uncaring. And the damage done to the men on the oil rig is intense: we see shattered bones and glass shards embedded deep in skin, cries of agony and faces twisted in fear. It’s a hard PG-13, and I’m a little surprised the sustained intensity did not merit an R.
What follows the explosion is a film of the sort that director Peter Berg has made more than a few of in recent years, one that is filled with a quiet, almost reluctant sort of heroism.
It’s a mood at the heart of Lone Survivor, about a team of SEALs who get trapped behind enemy lines and torn to pieces by the Taliban, in part because they refuse to take the easy way out and kill a villager they know will reveal their location. The Kingdom, one of the few great films to be made about the war on terror, is steeped in a sort of reluctant patriotism. Berg notably worried that the picture, about an FBI team trying to track down a terror cell in Saudi Arabia, would be seen as too "jingoistic," which may help explain an unfortunate and annoying tacked-on bit of moral equivalence at the end of his otherwise masterful action-procedural.
Even Hancock, Berg’s caustic, underrated treatment of the superhero genre, latches on to the idea that the best heroes are those who are more or less forced into the fray. In Berg’s universe, there’s no running from responsibility, no shirking duty. I imagine we’ll see more in this vein in Patriots Day, Berg and Wahlberg’s movie about the Boston Marathon bombing coming later this year.
Ever since The Rundown—the little-seen and underappreciated buddy movie that made plausible the idea of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as this generation’s premier action-comedy star—Berg has developed into one of our more impressive big-budget directors, tackling sometimes-somber subject matter with the requisite delicacy, and without letting things get morose.
It’s not just his proficiency with set pieces or his ability to put audiences in the midst of the action via handheld cameras without devolving into the dreaded "shaky cam" style Paul Greengrass sometimes adopts. Berg is a master at cultivating a sense of unforced camaraderie amongst his actors, a mood that serves him particularly well in the close confines of the Deepwater Horizon. Mark Wahlberg’s furrowed brow and friendly jibes contrast nicely with the Malkovich’s ferret-faced oil exec, while the weary-but-sharp-eyed Russell projects a sense of authority that commands a sort of loving respect from the rest of the crew.
Deepwater Horizon is a tremendously effective picture, expertly mixing excitement, dread, terror, and humor to keep the tension high without slipping into hopelessness.