Peter Berg’s “Deepwater Horizon” might just be the most confused, peculiar, conservative Americana cash grab in recent memory. It’s staged like a gritty, exploitative war film in the vein of Berg’s “Lone Survivor,” and yet it’s the story about the worst oil spill in history? There’s almost no mention of the environmental damage of the spill, and the people involved are all scientific technicians, and yet they behave like salt of the Earth, blue-collar Marines? And the movie’s biggest enemy is actually big business? Not to mention it stars Mark Wahlberg?
Labeling “Deepwater Horizon” as a movie that’s pandering to a certain sector of the American public may be reductive, because the movie’s real problem is that it isn’t about anything more than a tragedy. Like a Transformers movie, it’s obsessed with metallic carnage and special effects even before everything goes to hell, and it’s loaded with mechanical jargon as if the way in which an oil rig works is interesting enough to anyone on its own. “Deepwater Horizon” wants to praise human sacrifice, but it stops short at exploring the mental struggle heroes face or examining their values.
On board the Deepwater Horizon, Berg helicopters around the rig like it’s an aircraft carrier and pops up location subtitles and coordinates as though it were a military campaign. And yet once the whole rig explodes, have fun trying to identify where people are in relation to the surface or to the most wreckage. The characters all get lost in muddy debris and delirious shouting, and it seems ridiculous that an explosion could happen at the drill and Wahlberg wouldn’t notice it in his office.
Once brought aboard, Wahlberg and captain Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) start grilling the business guys of BP on the project’s lack of oversight. In one scene Wahlberg rattles off more than a dozen problems preventing the rig’s safety, from the phone lines being down to the smoke detectors not working, and yet while the real cause of the explosion would’ve been a combination of natural problems beyond anyone’s control and negligence on the part of a lot of people, Berg pins all the blame on one guy.
That guy is Vidrine, played with gusto by John Malkovich as a thick accented Southern Gentleman. He’s so sinister he doesn’t even pronounce the letter H. “We’ve spent tousands and tousands of dollars on the project,” he says. He offers the one plausible explanation for why there’s an error with an initial test, and the movie has the nerve to throw him under the bus when he’s inevitably wrong.
But more tiring is Berg’s approach to action and dialogue. It’s endless gear-head babble with some casual locker room jabs thrown in without taking a breath. It’s a sudden explosion with the sound bottoming out and people shouting into the abyss. And it’s first responders of the coast guard sitting in a room rapidly answering phones and staring at screens as though they’re hunting Jason Bourne.
At least a movie like “Sully” jumbled the timeline and built suspense based on the hero grappling with his own moral compass. Even a movie like the tame “The Finest Hours” has a classical charm and a fresh belief that heroism can come from modest places, as opposed to just tough, ex-pats working on oil rigs.
11 people died during the explosion on board the Deepwater Horizon. The film names them one by one in the credits, smiling family photos adorning them in tribute as some sad guitar folk music strums in the background. They may be heroes, but is that enough for a movie?
2 stars