Great effects, not so much sociology or ecology.
Deepwater Horizon
Grade: B
Director: Peter Berg (Battleship)
Screenplay: Mathew Michael Carnahan, Matthew Sand
Cast: Mark Wahlberg (Lone Survivor), Kurt Russell
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hr 47 min
by John DeSando
“They said the black oil wouldn’t come ashore. Well, it is ashore. It’s here to stay and it’s going to keep coming.” Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish.
The worst ecological disaster in history provides us with one of the exciting American disaster films in history: Deepwater Horizon. Director Peter Berg so authentically recreates the oil-rig explosion and its aftermath that, if you see it in IMAX, you will feel as if you were there, and possibly cry over the loss that could have been avoided. Eleven deaths and countless others wounded, along with millions of gallons of crude are consequential.
Mark Wahlberg (remember him as hero in Berg’s Lone Survivor) gives another heroic performance, this time as Transocean chief electronic technician Mike Williams, more like Kurt Russell’s (what is it with his mustaches?) usual disaster profile, who is here as skipper Jimmy Harrell. With an impressive supporting group, they give the feeling of ordinary people caught in unimaginable hell as Mother Nature explodes oil and methane to completely destroy the floating rig.
The most interesting part of the film precedes the 2010 explosion off the coast of Louisiana: The representative administrators from BP are led by the usually bad-boy John Malkovich, playing Donald Vidrine, an official more interested in the bottom line than the humans who will end up on the ocean floor. The BP officials have let slide a crucial test of the cement supporting the rig, and subsequent events prove them wrong to avoid a test that would have cost the multi-billion dollar corporation a pittance compared to the cost of disaster.
While the opening of the film is filled with jargon-laced repartee among the crew and the usual homely scene between Mike and his wife (Kate Hudson) and daughter (an impressive Stella Allen), the latter part of the film emphasizes Mike’s heroics, important to the genre but hardly the point the film should be making. Deepwater Horizon should have in part been a cautionary tale about corporate greed and a wake-up call for safety upgrades. Maybe even a small emphasis on the lives of ordinary working citizens off the rig affected by the blast would have been in order.
Actually the film shows Peter Berg a modern master of fire and mud with some lethal gas thrown in. As a social commentator, not so much.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
