OCTOBER 17, 2016
Well, this was a nice surprise.
Let’s just say that Peter Berg’s recreation of the disastrous 2010 explosion on the oil rig “Deepwater Horizon” was not terribly high on my must-see list of movies. But I began to hear that it was really pretty good, and when I looked on the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, it had better reviews than several other current films that I really like, so I said what the hell.
I’m glad I did.
I don’t want to make too big a case for it. It’s basically a 21st Century version of a 1970’s disaster movie, with the first hour devoted to getting to know all the principals before things go kaboom, but unlike most disaster movies, this is surprisingly the best hour in the film. Mark Wahlberg portrays good guy Mike Williams who must leave his supportive wife (Kate Hudson, who’s actually quite effective) and daughter to head off for the next three weeks on the ill-fated oil rig, and Berg creates a believable family dynamic to make you care more about Mike’s fate.
The rig’s unofficial boss is Jimmy Harrell, who is known by all as “Mr. Jimmy” (Kurt Russell). Whenever Wahlberg and Russell are in the same scene, the screen just oozes testosterone that envelops the first 3 or 4 rows of the theater.
The third major character is Andrea Felytas (Gina Rodriguez, Golden Globe winner for the CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” impressive in her first major film role), the monitor for the safety indicators onboard the rig who keeps a level head when all around her were losing theirs.
The key player here is Wahlberg, who last teamed up with director Berg for 2013’s “Lone Survivor,” a very suspenseful war film that was slightly marred by an excessive “rah, rah, America” subtext, but nonetheless worked. There’s a little of that here, with several shots of the American flag unfurling as billows of fire burst out in the background. Berg does have an ability to capture how regular people talk, however, a talent he displayed most effectively in his 2004 original film of “Friday Night Lights,” and one which carries the first hour, both with the conversations between Wahlberg and his family and the “how was your weekend?” everyday banter among the workers on the rig before disaster strikes.
The bad guys are, of course, the executives of BP, British Petroleum, who have rented the rig and whose insistence on pushing workers to ignore red flags for safety so that they can meet their production schedule is legendary and personified by Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich, at his silky Louisiana-accented best) and his henchman Robert Kaluza (Brad Leland, a favorite from Berg’s TV version of “Friday Night Lights”). Like cost-cutters in any disaster movie, they get their just comeuppance.
What the screenwriters (Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand based on Sand’s story and a New York Times article by David Roadhe and Stephanie Saul) have had to so is cobble together a story that is still true to the facts but also one that is dramatically compelling. The actors know that they have to make an impression in Hour 1 because, when the craziness happens in Hour 2, it’s every person for himself and characterization (generally) goes out the window.
Still, “Deepwater Horizon” works most effectively on the action-movie level, which Berg handles with aplomb. Yes, we all know how it turned out, but he still manages to make us care whether everybody gets out OK. Berg blows thing up very well, but it is the characters who are most at risk, and he lays the groundwork for us to be invested in them.
Don’t be necessarily be put off by the idea of spending 100 minutes on an oil rig. At its best (which is most of the time), “Deepwater Horizon” is a deeply human story of men and women who are doing a job to support their families, to whom they want to get back, when all hell breaks loose and they simply want to survive. If you’re skeptical of this as a movie choice (as I was), give “Deepwater Horizon” a chance, and you will be glad that you did.
GRADE: B
