Movie Review: 'Deepwater Horizon'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- As a memorial, as a tribute, as a eulogy, Deepwater Horizon has unmistakable power and value.

As a drama, unfortunately, not so much.

The man-made-disaster docudrama focuses on the biggest oil spill – the worst ecological incident -- in American history.

It's set on the offshore drilling rig that lends the film its name, which was operated by Transocean and was drilling for BP, and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, taking the lives of eleven crew members.

It details the heroic but unsuccessful attempts to prevent the explosion that occurred on that fateful day.

Mark Wahlberg plays the central character, Mike Williams, the chief electrical technician, while Kate Hudson plays his wife and Kurt Russell is the ship's elder statesman, the offshore installation manager (the first time she and her adopted father have worked together), while John Malkovich portrays a bottom-line-worshipping BP executive.

The script by Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan is based on a New York Times article, "Deepwater Horizon's Final Hours," by David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul, which chronicled the explosion and the aftermath.

And it clearly points to corporate negligence – that is, corner-cutting by BP -- as the primary reason for the tragedy, although the film would certainly benefit from a greater sense of outrage.

Director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Very Bad Things, Hancock, Battleship, Lone Survivor) uses plenty of technical jargon to help give the technically accomplished film a gritty authenticity.

But because we know so little about the characters we know are in life-threatening jeopardy, when the climax arrives, although of course we root for them to survive, we root the way we would for anybody, not for these particular characters.

And we never – not even when death approaches – lose ourselves emotionally in the victims' peril to a sufficient degree to stop noticing the stunts and special effects and props and the other elements of the moviemaking process.

A shame, that, making the film seem impressive but hollow, as it assaults our senses with a blur of fire and noise and debris, and ends up spilling over into the tasteless category of disaster porn.

True, there is heroism displayed when workers try to save each other's lives, but there's little to feel good about in this nightmarish depiction beyond relief that there weren't even more fatalities.

And although pointing out flaws in the conception and production doesn't detract from the film's value and importance as a cautionary tale, it remains a severely limited stab at entertainment in the name of social change.

So we'll survive 2 stars out of 4. Deepwater Horizon registers as a bad movie made for a good reason.