You might think you don’t want to watch a movie about the BP oil spill—of course, you’re probably not on Alabama Liberal if that’s you, but even if it is, you’ll be surprised. Personally, I refuse to buy gas at BP and any movie that shows exactly how corporations fuck-up to create environmental disasters is more than worth watching.
What Works: To me, director Peter Berg (also a character actor you’ve doubtlessly seen onscreen as well) has always been more successful with his television projects (“Friday Night Lights,” “The Leftovers,” the criminally underrated “Wonderland”) than his films (“Battleship,” “Lone Survivor”) but “Deepwater Horizon” is easily the best thing he’s directed since “The Kingdom” and the film-version of “Friday Night Lights.” It reminds you of the director you thought Peter Berg was going to be roughly ten years ago: a brainy, introspective version of Michael Bay who knew how to craft crisp, well-staged action and when to get out of the way of sharp, tough-guy dialogue.
Mark Wahlberg does what he can here (and Kurt Russell proves once again he’s worthy of a Michael Keaton-sized comeback), but the movie belongs to twin-disasters: a huge oil rig explosion that was totally preventable and John Malkovich’s greedy cajun executive. When either of these is onscreen, the movie soars into a feature-length version of that stand-out oil-rig fire sequence in “There Will Be Blood” except this is on the ocean.
What Doesn’t: The message of “Fuck BP” is pretty hard to miss, but since I want to make it crystal-clear to all the corporate apologists out there—most of whom would never watch this movie—it wouldn’t have hurt to have a character say this, explicitly, loudly, roughly 100 times or so. And some of the technical dialogue is a little hard to follow early on in the movie.
What I Would Have Done Differently: You’re right, BP is a terrible corporation that deserves to become insolvent and disintegrate. Oh, uhhh, the movie, right…go see it.
Glad to know that that BIG mess was not forgotten already.