honest and harrowing, led by three remarkable performances

Rating: 8/10 (14 October 2016)

Deepwater Horizon can't help but be compared to Clint Eastwood's Sully if only because they each came out within a month of each other (if that), and they both involve hard-working, dedicated professionals at their job who pay a varying degree of prices for being at the right place but the most wrong time possible. While one certainly carries the Pedigree of Legends(TM) at the helm, I think that what makes Horizon the better movie is that Berg doesn't muck around with telling his story: these men went to this oil rig (after a safety team left very prematurely), and after a couple of Negative Impact tests the entire rig went to s*** and caught fire.
No, more than that, it turned into the kind of disaster we often take for granted in big 100+ million tentpoles. Only difference here, it's not oil riggers drawn up by Michael Bay - these guys were real, and goddamn it, Peter Berg will make you KNOW it! This is a somewhat manipulative film emotionally speaking, but then Berg isn't out to make something subtle - he can't when it involves a story that is (do I have a synonym I can use for this word, nah, fine) explosive as the one he has here. Like Sully too it's not overlong, clocking in at 96 minutes. Unlike that film this doesn't have such detail into the investigation of what happened after the fact, probably because Berg and his producers and team know there's WAY more than enough drama in just detailing what happened to lead up to the explosion and how it got so out of control. It's a film cut in half structurally: the first is all set-up, giving us the dedicated workers (Mark Wahlberg as our hero, which is emphasized because he's the only one with a wife apparently with Kate Hudson on the other end; Kurt Russell as the character who may be missing from a Howard Hawks movie; John Malkovich playing his best kind of villain, which is slimy and yet icily intelligent), then the second is when things go to hell.
I think the structure works well most of all for the film, and all the actors bring not just emotional intensity; Wahlberg isn't always Olivier (who ever said he was on the other hand), but put him as a commanding but unassuming blue-collar guy and he can give it a great degree of truth. It almost (no, what 'almost', it does) goes into overload in the final minutes of its climax as he and one other character are left on the oil rig, and his character hits the apex of being a Mega-Hero (part of the manipulation I think is strategic - Berg and co. know nearly everyone seeing this movie won't know if Mike Williams comes out alive at the end or not, so all the set-up with his wife and kid at home makes it seem both very obvious and very not). Meanwhile, Russell and Malkovich make good opposing figures, one all about safety as his character in the New Webster Dictionary definition under IRONY gets a safety award within minutes of the devastation, the other all about... well, his own kind of logic, but deep down all about money.
If anyone brought a degree of dimension it actually was Malkovich, who certainly doesn't appear to be someone we are going to have much sympathy with - he comments at one point that BP's worth of 185 billion will go up to 186 with some extra time shaved off to get the oil out - but he also has a job to do, in his way. He seems more pathetic by the end of the film than someone who has been crushed by any other opposing force, and really the villain of the story is fate and pressing against nature: you f*** with the Earth too much and it will fight back. But there's also in Berg's vision not a heavy deal of commentary there either; if you feel guilty driving in your car from the movie theater after seeing this, it's less a direct result of the film's message than it is a by-product.
If there are marks against the filmmaker it's that he brings the same hyper-kinetic shaky-camera style and editing, how he brings us into the filmic space of this location and as the situation unfolds so tragically, and it gets to be much. At times. I say that qualifier because there are some moments, mostly when characters are finding one another in the darkened and chaotic mess right after the explosion, how Mike finds Mr Jimmy and the others, and there it works well. It's when Berg has to cut between so many multiple points of view - the Coast Guard getting things together, men getting on to lifeboats, the woman being put under immense pressure at the station to get things moving (or not, under direct orders), and Kate Hudson at home - that it goes into over-drive. Not so much that I ever lost the thread or felt an emotional disconnect, but it did remind me in an uncanny way "hey, it's STILL a movie... mostly... you know, right?!" I think Deepwater Horizon is a good movie. It's honest in its presentation and the depictions of these men on the rig before the explosion, with just enough humanity to them (not to be confused with depth) that you can get invested when it kicks into 1000x gear, and near the very end there's some hard gut-punches that are more about how this *is* a trauma for those who lived through it and it may never go away completely. Could it have been a masterpiece? Not sure... maybe if James Cameron had been there.