serious subject turned into empty action flick

Rating: 4/10 (5 October 2016)

This was a major disappointment. Despite so much of the story depending on technical details, the movie communicated next to nothing. In the early scenes on the rig, people were shouting at each other, unable to understand each other because of the background noise. However, the audience was made to suffer the same thing, having no idea what people were saying. It turns out they were asking if a "cement test" had been completed, and after some time, after they were indoors and checked with various people, they discovered that the test had not been completed. So why was the audience made to go through the nonsense of not hearing what people were saying? It seemed a ridiculous plot point to portray in such an annoying way. The significance was that the test had not been completed, not that it took a few minutes to find that fact out because it was too noisy outside for people to talk.
Then began a number of discussions about technical matters. Little effort was made to help the audience understand any of it. Even the few diagrams and supposed shots of what was happening beneath the waves were far from enlightening. I think we were just supposed to let us the technical talk slide over us as mumbo-jumbo only engineers would understand. For my part, I began to think I'd rather have been watching a PBS documentary about the incident that so that I would know exactly what happened.
Once the disaster begins, very little effort is made to continue the narrative. There's a skeleton story of a few crew members saving each other and trying to get off the rig, but the vast majority of the time we just see explosions and flying debris, over and over and over, an endless series of quick cuts, each scene lasting only a few seconds, with lots and lots of noise, of course. Despite the action and colour and noise, it all became a tiresome.
At the end of the movie we see photos of the actual people involved in the incident. None of them, of course, looked like glamorous movie stars like Marky Marky or Kate Hudson. The roles required no great acting talent. Did the producers really have to hire big-name Hollywood names to fill those roles (one of the producers was Marky Mark). It seemed to be a great opportunity to use some lesser-known actors.