See it on a big screen

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2016)

The heyday of the disaster movie was the mid 1970s when we had the likes of "The Poseidon Adventure", "The Towering Inferno" and "Earthquake" - all fiction but convincingly engaging. More latterly the best disaster movies have been based on real- life incidents - think of "Apollo 13", "Titantic" and "The Perfect Storm". So the latest work in this genre, "Deepwater Horizon", portrays a true and high-profile incident that occurred on 20 April 2010 on an oil rig 41 miles off the coast of south-east Louisiana.
There are many ways in which this story could have been told, including an indictment of cost-conscious management and weak regulation to the economic and natural impacts of the biggest environmental catastrophe in US history. Director Peter Breg, writer Matthew Michael Carnahan, and instigator, producer and star Mark Wallenberg have chosen a narrative that focuses on the oil rig workers themselves and the heroism shown by them in the face of an utter inferno. Eleven men lost their lives and their names and photographs appear at the end of the film as a silent tribute to their sacrifice.
Almost all of the movie is located on the oil rig and the film-makers spent eight months constructing an 85% scale model of the rig which provides a sense of realism. Much of the dialogue is hard to catch and difficult to understand but I guess this adds to the sense of verisimilitude. When hell breaks lose, we no longer have any sense of where we are and what is happening but I suppose that was the case for the workers themselves.
This is a movie that should be seen at the cinema where the impressive visuals and convincing sounds will sweep around the viewer who will feel the heat and noise personally. "Deepwater Horizon" does what it sets out to do very effectively, showing in an 'entertaining' manner how even, in the face of utter chaos, some can still care about others, but it fails to represent sufficiently the bigger picture: that so often private corporations put profit before people and governments are too weak in regulating them.