Deepwater Horizon

Deepwater Horizon (2016) covers the oil rig explosion of 2010, and almost all of it happens on that one night. A drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The schedule has slipped, costs have risen, and the company men want to skip a safety test. The crew objects. The test is shortened. Hours later the pressure coming up the well blows the platform apart. The first half is technical and deliberately slow, explaining what the pressure readings mean. Without that section it is impossible to see why the explosion was inevitable. The second half is entirely fire. Eleven workers died and the film tries not to turn the deaths into spectacle. A near full scale replica of the platform was built in Louisiana; most of the scenes are not digital. The second dimension of the event, the oil that ran into the Gulf for months and the environmental disaster, stays outside the film. It tells that night and not what followed, which is a deliberate but incomplete choice. Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and Gina Rodriguez star. John Malkovich plays the company man and is the only conventional villain in it. Peter Berg directed; it is the second of the true event films he made with Wahlberg. It runs 107 minutes. Good for: disaster films, true events, and technical storytelling. Less good for: the fire scenes are long and suffocating, and anyone curious about the environmental consequences should look elsewhere.