Review

Well Done: 'Deepwater Horizon' tells tragic story of biggest oil spill in U.S. history without exploiting it

Chief electronics technician Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) takes charge amid the chaos after an explosion on an oil rig 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana in Peter Berg’s fact-based Deepwater Horizon.
Chief electronics technician Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) takes charge amid the chaos after an explosion on an oil rig 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana in Peter Berg’s fact-based Deepwater Horizon.

When something big or memorable happens in the world -- especially involving Americans -- you can pretty much go ahead and begin casting the movie in your head. Just in the past few months, we've had Sully, a fact-based film about the US Airways pilot who successfully landed a passenger plane on the Hudson; Hands of Stone, a bio-pic about champion boxer Roberto Duran; War Dogs, about a pair of stoner millennials who somehow ended up becoming big-time arms dealers; and, of course, Michael Bay's 13 Hours, which covered the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Lybia. Hollywood, desperate to fill the churning maw of its unrelenting schedule, sees fit to take any notable happening, skim the gist of it, and use only enough relevant facts so their subsequent film can claim it was "based on true events," a particularly disingenuous moniker that does not preclude studios jamming these events into a standard three-act story.

I'm happy to report, however, that Peter Berg's Deepwater Horizon, about the worst oil spill in U.S. history and the men and women who had to fight like hell to get off the disintegrating rig as it was gushing oil and blazing with fire, hews closely enough to the facts and is made with such care that it avoids the acrid smell of exploitation. It's a "real events" film that respects its subject enough to do it proper justice.

Deepwater Horizon

88 Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Dylan O’Brien, Kate Hudson, Ethan Suplee, Trace Adkins, Brad Leland, Joe Chrest, James DuMont, Dave Maldonado, Douglas M. Griffin, Jeremy Sande

Director: Peter Berg

Rating: PG-13, for prolonged intense disaster sequences and related disturbing images, and brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

That's not to say it doesn't employ a bevy of disaster set-up scenes to properly prepare you for the annihilation to come, it just does them with finesse. We first meet Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) in the comfort of his own bed, lying next to his beautiful wife (Kate Hudson), and later, hanging out with his precocious 10-year-old daughter (Stella Allen), who just so happens to be preparing a class presentation about what her father, an oil rig technician, does for a living.

This detail proves surprisingly useful -- as a prop, the daughter takes a can of shaken up Coke and sticks a metal tube through the aluminum hull to simulate the resulting explosive pressure of the contents -- because one thing Berg and screenwriters Michael Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan (working from a very detailed and rich article in The New York Times from reporters David Rohde and Stephanie Saul) don't do is dumb-down the dialogue for the audience. When Mike flies via helicopter to the offshore rig, along with helmsman Andrea (Gina Rodriguez) and rig foreman Mr. Jimmy (Kurt Russell), we vaguely understand that BP, the nefarious oil company renting the rig, has, for cost reasons, sent home an inspection crew before it could properly complete its job. Beyond that, the specifics are largely lost in garbled jargon further cloaked by the booming whirs, knocks and grinding of a rig in full throat.

Smartly, Berg uses the power of the visual medium to better inform his audience. We might not totally understand what a "negative pressure test" consists of, but we can certainly read a dial coded in red, yellow and green to indicate its unsettling performance. Further emphasizing the danger, Berg also repeatedly cuts 3.5 miles down to the ocean floor, where we see the smallest fissure gradually grow into the total eruption. At various times, the camera also shows the interior of the pipeline and the doomed blowout preventer, with the flow of oil eventually gaining the punishing force of a waterfall at full blast.

We can certainly understand Mr. Jimmy's controlled fury in dealing with the pair of BP operatives on board, including the dim-witted Kaluza (Brad Leland) and the particularly odious Vidrine (John Malkovich, who relishes such roles), who order the drilling to commence despite much of the crew's discomfort. When the rig finally blows about halfway into the film, chaos ensues and everyone is in a struggle to survive. Oil-soaked and rattled, Vidrine has the nerve to ask "What happened?".

It is here that the film's carefully orchestrated first act, filled with small personal details involving the crew members -- Andrea's efforts to get her vintage car's engine to properly fire; Mike's securing of a fossilized dinosaur tooth for his daughter; one seaman's confession of switching from coffee to green tea and yoga; a snippet of a discussion about the Alabama/LSU rivalry; even an open can of mixed nuts placed inconspicuously on the desk of the Coast Guard operator who first takes the distress call from the doomed rig -- brings the horror that the crew is now facing into terrible focus. We genuinely worry about these characters because we've been given just enough information to keep them real.

The film benefits from this attention to detail and refusal to follow prescribed dramatic flourishes. While it's true the film comes to a bit of a physical climax, with a couple of characters taking drastic steps to survive, it still tamps down the action to keep it reasonably well-grounded. The film's most openly emotional scene, with some survivors returning to shore and reuniting with loved ones, is tastefully downplayed, with the dialogue lowered to a faint whisper under the swell of the musical score.

The film is bookended by clips of testimony from the real debriefing of the crew -- most of which further implicates BP as negligent for the lack of even basic safety and preventive measures-- but we're also treated to photos of the actual crew and some of their whereabouts since the 2010 disaster. Berg soberly ends his re-creation with photos and videos of the 11 crew members who lost their lives. The film, focused as it is on the people on the rig, doesn't get into the ecological damage the well leak caused -- pumping some 270 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days -- nor does it explain the legal blasting BP received for its negligence, but it does helpfully point out that the two men who ordered the rig to keep on drilling were never charged with any crime.

MovieStyle on 09/30/2016

Upcoming Events