Deep­wa­ter Horizon

Some­what unjust­ly neglect­ed even by the most enthu­si­as­tic pro­po­nents of vul­gar auteurism, the unmis­tak­ably patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can film­mak­er Peter Berg has been mak­ing remark­ably effi­cient action movies and TV shows for well over a decade. In his pre­vi­ous film, 2013’s Lone Sur­vivor, the direc­tor nev­er­the­less strug­gled with the notion of the all-Amer­i­can hero. While the elite fight­ers in the film are plain­ly depict­ed as heroes, it was dif­fi­cult to view their deaths, in an incred­i­bly mis­guid­ed mis­sion in Afghanistan, as any­thing oth­er than a use­less loss of human life. The log­i­cal step in the film’s sub­ver­sion would have been a crit­i­cism of the peo­ple respon­si­ble, but Berg instead opt­ed to resolve the sto­ry as a trag­ic tale of the inescapable but hon­ourable loss­es of war.

In Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon, Berg doesn’t shy away from appor­tion­ing blame for the deaths of anoth­er group of hard-work­ing Amer­i­cans. The film vehe­ment­ly demonis­es the pure greed of the oil com­pa­ny British Petro­le­um that led to the explo­sion of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon off­shore oil rig on 20 April, 2010, killing 11 men and cre­at­ing the worst oil spill in US his­to­ry. With the excep­tion of John Malkovich’s devi­ous and arro­gant BP boss, the oth­er com­pa­ny men come off as reck­less and stu­pid, with Brad Leland a stand­out, return­ing to the role of a man in con­stant state of denial that he inhab­it­ed so well in Berg’s TV show Fri­day Night Lights. With a host of real-life vil­lains in place, Berg finds in this true sto­ry a straight­for­ward and accu­rate exam­ple of hero­ism in the char­ac­ter of Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg, excel­lent as ever), a fore­man who helped save a dozen of his col­leagues dur­ing the incident.

There is intense plea­sure in see­ing this man over­come incred­i­ble chal­lenges and pain to save not only him­self but also oth­ers, even more so because there are no stunts involved. These are ordi­nary men going through unusu­al cir­cum­stances. We root for them far more than we did the sol­diers in Lone Sur­vivor, not sim­ply because they are not com­plic­it in a ques­tion­able Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion, but because they are shown to be vic­tims put at risk by pow­er­ful men who ignore the risks of the oil rig. We want these decent men and women to suc­ceed, keep a cool head while the shocked BP boss­es walk around in a stu­por. And indeed they do.

One of the joys of Berg’s work lies in wit­ness­ing peo­ple who are real­ly good at their job, but also at com­mu­ni­ca­tion – two aspects that are part and par­cel of a gen­er­al ​‘no-bull­shit’ atti­tude here. Fri­day Night Lights beau­ti­ful­ly demon­strat­ed the director’s abil­i­ty to por­tray authen­tic every­day life, and it also reeks least of patri­o­tism in an oth­er­wise deeply pro-Amer­i­can body of work. Although the over-famil­iar­i­ty and polite­ness of the char­ac­ters in the every­day moments pre­ced­ing the inci­dent seem a specif­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can trait, it isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad one. Instead, it fos­ters affec­tion and admi­ra­tion for the characters.

This invest­ment makes the build-up dur­ing the 12 hours pri­or to the acci­dent all the more tense and thrilling. The pre­cise expla­na­tion of the logis­tics of the oil rig isn’t bor­ing or dis­tract­ing, but rather becomes absolute­ly cru­cial. Impec­ca­ble CGI con­sis­tent­ly helps main­tain the high stakes, so much so that we only much lat­er won­der how on earth such real­ism was achieved. Yes, there are Amer­i­can flags float­ing in the air at times, but not even these brief moments of unbri­dled patri­o­tism can ruin what is pure­ly and sim­ply a great action movie.