October 24: Deepwater Horizon (2016 - Peter Berg)

★★★

Deepwater Horizon is a fun couple of hours at the movies.  Peter Berg uses the same elements that Hollywood figured out back in the 20s—heroic everyman, action, bad guy and melodrama—but he amps most of these up into 21^st century expression.  Mike Williams is a decent guy who rises to meet the challenges posed by the devastation on the oil rig, and the action has contemporary intensity with fires roaring up corridors and bits of metal zinging by people after mud explosions.  The bad guy here is BP, a soulless corporation represented by Donald Vidrine, emphatically places profit above people.  And melodrama informs the film, from the sweetness of Mike’s leave-taking of his family to his wife’s tears as she learns of the accident and on to their reunion as a family.  Along the way, one brave crew member is killed as he saves the rest of the crew, the honorable Mr. Jimmy insists on returning to the bridge despite his wounds, and Mike rescues several of the injured while gallantly trying to restart the rig’s engines.  Much of Deepwater Horizon is a silent era adventure with up-to-date elements.

Exposition here can be obvious, as when Mike’s daughter explains subterranean oil pressure by using a shaken can of Coke, but the exposition is some of the most interesting and compelling content.  We learn what fantastically complex mechanisms these floating oil rigs are, and we come to understand the risks and precautions on the them.  In fact, Berg devotes the entire first half of the movie to exposition as our dread builds since we know what the outcome is going to be.  It’s one of the finer pleasures of the film.

Deepwater Horizon has a few missteps.  Berg gives John Malkovich too much latitude as Vidrine, so we get a Simon Legree-style bad guy who is far more caricature than Kurt Russell’s Jimmy Harrell or Wahlberg’s Mike.  And the film's women lack agency.  Andrea needs Mike to give her the courage to save herself, and Felicia stays home with the kid and is left to cry and fret.  But Deepwater Horizon doesn't aim to challenge or instruct; it's a fun action film that also manages to give us an engaging sense of what goes on aboard such a huge vessel and of the colossal forces it sits astride.