Deepwater Horizon

UK Release Date. 29 September 2016
Certification. 12A
Running Time. 1 hour 47 mins
Director. Peter Berg
Cast. Kate Hudson, John Malkovich, Dylan O'Brien, Gina Rodriguez, Kurt Russell, Mark Wahlberg.
Rating. 66%

Review.

In April 2010, an explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform off the southeast coast of Louisiana led to the world's largest marine oil spill. The US Federal Government estimated 210 million gallons [almost five million barrels] of crude oil was released into the Gulf of Mexico, and the explosion claimed the lives of 11 oil workers.

Peter Berg's 2016 Deepwater Horizon is a dramatisation of these catastrophic events. 

Berg excels at explaining complex technical drilling terminology, routine procedures, and company politics, assuming the audience possesses a modicum of intelligence. The attention to detail, pacing and exceptional realism in the first hour draw comparisons with Paul Greengrass and his intense, immersive cinéma vérité filmmaking style. Berg clearly understands the importance of character, as do his screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand. As such, the first half of Deepwater Horizon is spent getting to know the characters and the layout of the (meticulously recreated) drilling platform. The director invests time in establishing the principal characters, and it pays dividends as an extraordinary situation is made to feel ordinary by a group of oil workers' mundane exchanges, gripes and grumbles. 

Surprisingly, Berg holds the inevitable explosion sequence until far later in the film than you might expect; he clearly is more interested in the build-up to the maelstrom, creating a palpable sense of foreboding in the first act. For an hour, Deepwater Horizon is excellent. However, when the disaster finally arrives on screen, the film loses momentum and much of its tension as Berg struggles to make sense of the towering, floating inferno. When everything’s ablaze, everything looks the same, so all the work establishing the geography of the drilling platform goes to waste. The sheer spectacle is undeniable, but the human touch is, temporarily, lost as you begin to lose a sense of the characters amongst the mud, oil and flames.

Like Berg’s previous film, Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon is gripping and intense. He manages to balance highly technical exposition in the first act with compelling, visceral action once the disaster strikes. 

Whilst the human cost was understandably at the forefront of the storyline, one aspect of the incident sadly omitted was the environmental impact of the disaster. A missed opportunity from my point of view.