Interesting and educational but you walk out longing for the campy disaster movies of the seventies!

Rating: 4/10 (20 September 2016)

Yes, I walked out of this film knowing something I didn't know before. However, I didn't care very much about it, when I really should have. And I certainly didn't care about too many of the characters.
We have Mark Wahlberg and we like him because he loves his wife and daughter. And we have Gina Rodriugez who we are introduced to when she has a twenty second argument with her old, run down car and another twenty second exchange with her boyfriend. Besides that, we know nothing about her.
And we know nothing about the lives or personalities of virtually anyone else on the oil rig, so we have no reason to care if they live or die. We want Wahlberg to go home to the wife and seven year old daughter who love him. We care little about Gina and nothing about anyone else. Yes, there is also the character of the corporate cold codfish who puts profits above people. We've seen him hundreds of times and this guy is no different, in spite of John Malkovich's history of creating unique, interesting characters. And we have Kurt Russell as the hardworking, dedicated, gruff, manly team leader who we've also seen two thousand times.
THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, the arguably campy disaster flick from the seventies was the first film that came to my mind. Thirty five years after the last time I saw the movie, I can still remember specific details about a dozen of the characters. Hundreds of people were on the boat, at least twelve of them were carefully defined with life histories and unique personalities and because they advertised that there would only be six survivors, you sat at your seat's edge pulling for the people you liked. When the faces of the actual real life casualties are shown at the end of DEEPWATER HORIZON, you have no idea which characters, if any, were based on which people.
Have audiences become so dumbed down and is HBO our only salvation? There were at least twenty active, carefully defined, unique characters in any given season of BOARDWALK EMPIRE, there were just as many on THE SOPRANOS and there were at least thirty or forty on OZ. Do contemporary directors actually believe that 21st century film audiences can only follow one character at a time? Again, you cared if Mark Wahlberg lived or died. You didn't know much or care much about anyone else in DEEPWATER HORIZON. And you barely thought or cared about the actual issue. I walked out of STAR TREK IV wanting to save the whales and I left PROMISED LAND wishing I could do something about fracking. Do I care about the greed of major oil companies? I did before I saw this movie. I don't care much more or less now.