There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. “I’ll tell you one film I really did like,” says Billy Sol, “Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation. . . . People got blowed up good in that one, blowed up real good!”
Well, it’s not a ’70s German art house picture like The Third Generation, but if Big Jim and Billy Sol were still in the reviewing business, they would surely view the new Mark Wahlberg film Deepwater Horizon as Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and Children of Paradise all rolled into one. Things blow up good in this movie. They blow up real good. They blow up gooder than anything has ever blowed up before. They blow up with all the power and force the special-effects teams of 2016 can muster. They blow up once. They blow up twice. They blow up on the left hand of the screen. They blow up on the right hand of the screen. It’s basically an hour of blowing up.
Perhaps you thought The Towering Inferno was an inferno back in 1974; that was like finally lighting a match at a campsite after a gigantic thundershower compared with Deepwater Horizon.
Yes, I know Deepwater Horizon is a true story about the floating oil rig of the same name 47 miles offshore and the catastrophic failure on April 20, 2010, that caused it to explode, and killing 11 people. The film casts itself as a tribute to those who died, and its central character is Deepwater Horizon’s chief electronics technician, who saved at least three lives in the midst of the conflagration.
But a movie is a movie, and while the people who make it may want to piggyback on the real-life catastrophe to earn themselves brownie points for humanitarianism—and insulate themselves from criticism lest the criticism seem like an attack on those who suffered and died and acted selflessly—in the end you’re only watching a re-creation, a simulation, of an event. And the part of the simulation that sells this movie is the simulated destruction of Deepwater Horizon. The very talented director Peter Berg may want you to shed a tear for the loss and the heroics of those who survived, but what he really wants you to do is gasp when the things go boom. That’s why Summit Entertainment and Participant Media invested $110 million to make it. And they’d really like it if you “EXPERIENCE IT IN IMAX.”
The weird thing about Deepwater Horizon is that it tells the least significant part of the story for which the rig’s name is a synecdoche. While the loss of life in an industrial accident is certainly a terrible tragedy, and heroics performed during any such disaster are worthy of celebration, those phenomena have nothing to do with the way Deepwater Horizon became a household name. Its notoriety derives from what happened after the explosions—how the hole the explosion had punched into the gulf’s floor poured 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The movie gets into it a little bit with a mustache-twirling villain from BP named Vidrine (played with extreme but amusing hamminess by John Malkovich) oozin’ Cajun-accented menace as he seeks ta charm an’ bully da cap’n ‘n’ crew into rushin’ da woik, which do make da system fail and da pipe blow. But Vidrine’s presence muddies the tale Berg wants to tell—after all, he’s on the rig too. As James B. Meigs wrote in Slate, “BP’s company man Vidrine certainly didn’t expect that his decisions that day would lead to him to be nearly incinerated by midnight. There has to be a better explanation for why intelligent people sometimes make such terrible decisions.”
That’s something you won’t learn from Deepwater Horizon. You won’t learn much from Deepwater Horizon, in fact. But who can honestly deny the pyrotechnical pleasures that once made Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok the Pauline Kaels of blowed-up-dom?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
