Try and conjure the images associated with the spring and summer of 2010: The pelican soaked in mud. The oil gushing eternally from the busted pipeline at the seabed and beamed onto our televisions in real time. The attempts to disperse the toxic chemicals, which only exacerbated the problem. An estimated 4.9 billion gallons “leaked” over three months, and Keith Olbermann raged about it nightly from his populist perch — dispatches from the waning days of crusading TV journalism.
Yet even at the time, when the news media occasionally did its job, the spill’s inciting incident — the rig explosion — quickly faded into the background, with attention focused entirely on capping the well. The 11 Transocean contractors who lost their lives on April 20 became an afterthought.
For this reason alone, Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon is an essential reminder of this travesty’s first victims, sacrificed at the altar of corporate profit. Based on a New York Times investigative article and set entirely on the day of the explosion, this unnatural disaster movie is undoubtedly full of reductive characterizations, liberal truth-stretching and crass over-dramatizations, worshipping at its own altar of the big-budget blockbuster. But the sound and fury signifies much.
To Berg’s credit, he makes us wait an hour into the picture for the first eruption, setting the scene on the free-floating rig through lengthy geysers of jargony talk. Battle lines between cautious heroes and glib villains are quickly established. The former is represented by Mark Wahlberg’s Mike Williams, a rakishly impudent systems engineer for Transocean; Kurt Russell’s Jimmy Harrell, the rig’s outspoken, dot-every-I manager; and Gina Rodriguez’s Andrea Fleytas, a navigational operator and reportedly the only female employee onboard. The baddies are represented by anonymous, out-of-shape bureaucratic baldpates from BP, only of one whom is played by an actor we recognize: a ruddy John Malkovich in a heavy, sometimes indiscernible Cajun dialect, savoring every moment of derisive smarm.
The verbal fisticuffs between the workers and their corporate overseers are dizzyingly abstruse, to the extent that if you haven’t worked on an oil rig, you’ll be lost on the knobs and gears, the stratified well structure and the industry argot. But we can understand a broken phone system, a shoddy computer server and a disabled smoke detector — and the observation by one crew member that the rig is cobbled together with “Band-Aids and bubblegum.” There is an inescapable feeling of slipshoddiness and corner-cutting at the expense of safety standards, and of a cascade of omens willfully ignored until, finally, the primordial goo begins to seep through the protective grates, and then gush unstoppably throughout the rig, and then cause a fire visible from 40 miles away.
The rest of the picture proceeds with more or less standard-issue post-apocalyptic rhythms, filled with the squishy sounds of glass shards extracted from flesh, of nightmarish lights flickering on an epileptic fritz, of heroic movie stars risking their lives to save their comrades from an impromptu hellscape. There’s even a freaked-out, oil-soaked CGI pelican running roughshod through the interior of an adjacent ship — the proverbial canary in the coalmine, alerting the rest of the world that all is not right aboard the towering monstrosity of capitalism nearby.
And there are facile moments too, like the silly foreshadowing gusher at Mike Williams’ home early in the film, when his daughter’s science experiment using a Coke can and some honey erupts in a dining-room deluge. But why linger on the flaws when the film’s heart, and its ethics, are in the right place?
We’re in the midst of a late-summer renaissance of quality recent-history features, and despite their formal differences, Sully, Snowden and now Deepwater Horizon all praise truth-tellers fighting against the system. The latter may be couched as a popcorn flick, but it’s a tribute cemented in the zeitgeist.
DEEPWATER HORIZON. Director: Peter Berg; Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Gina Rodriguez, John Malkovich, Dylan O’Brien, Kate Hudson, Ethan Suplee; Distributor: Summit; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most area theaters, including IMAX