Deepwater Horizon director Peter Berg, I think, has watched Alien many times, and he really gets it. You only have to watch either the film or television series of Friday Night Lights to get that he understands the importance of character, as do screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand. As such, a substantive initial chunk of Deepwater Horizon is spent with human beings. It pays real dividends. Mark Wahlberg, then, plays Mike Williams, who we meet as he’s about to embark on a 21 day stay on the Deepwater Horizon rig, just off the coast of the US. Just watching him and his crew – and it’s an ego-less ensemble piece, this – go through the motions of physically getting to the rig gives a strong indication as to the direction the film wants to take, with small details mattering, and the monotony (to them, not us) of the routine clear. The script is also happy to spout some Apollo 13-esque necessary technobabble, that effectively gets across that everyone on screen knows what they’re talking about, even if we don’t always. Again, in this instance, that’s a good thing. Deepwater Horizon is happy to treat its audience with a modicum of intelligence, and also spend time dwelling on the parts of the story that the audience isn’t so familiar with. After all, the explosion and subsequent large scale pollution was a story writ large across 24 hour news channels less than a decade ago. The characters at the heart of it? That’s where the film spends the bulk of its time. Take, for instance, Kurt Russell’s Jimmy, a man who priorities safety, pushing heavily back against the demands of BP, the mass corporation pumping millions into the rig. Russell, of course, is excellent, and he helps shine a light on a human being at the heart of the tragic. Surprisingly, Berg and his team hold the big physical moments until far later in the film than you might expect, instead building up characters to care about, and a very effective sense of foreboding. For a good hour, the movie is really excellent. It only loses its footing a little when things ultimately go wrong. Then, the shaky cam goes into overdrive – although it may have felt more noticeable as I saw the film on an IMAX screen – and, more crucially, you begin to lose sense of the characters. Trying to place who is talking and where they are on the rig gets trickier as the screen fills with fire and the speakers around you scream out noise. The sheer spectacle is undeniable, but the human touch is, temporarily, lost. We know bad things are going on, it’s just often not clear who they’re happening to. Deepwater Horizon is in UK cinemas from September 29th. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
