Deepwater Horizon

Director Peter Berg's Deepwater Horizon is mildly interesting, but completely pointless.  The film details events leading to a catastrophic "blow-out" and fire on an oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a true story involving plenty of perfidious behavior by British Petroleum.  Berg's movie involves grim, stiff performances by Kurt Russell and Mark Wahlberg as working class technicians on the Deepwater Horizon and SNL-style turn by Jon Malkovich as a nasty BP boss.  The film seems to have been so thoroughly vetted by lawyers fearful of BP reprisal that the picture makes no real points at all -- despite all of its gargantuan explosions, the film is strangely muted and inconsequential.  Like many modern directors addicted to big close-ups, Berg doesn't have any idea how to stage action sequences -- he uses screen-filling sweaty faces, quick cutting, and shots so short as to have a subliminal effect: usually a fireball or something falling or a body hurtling through the air.  Berg fails to establish the topography of the oil rig and how its various rooms and functions are related to one another.  This yields weirdly paradoxical sequences showing spectacular catastrophes in one location that don't even register as thumps or bangs in other parts of the rig.  I assume that the rig was so huge that the isolation of control portions of the machine from other areas is plausible.  But in the earlier sequences leading to the catastrophe, Berg stages a lot of shots as "walk and talk" scenes similar to something we might see in an Aaron Sorkin show like West Wing -- these shots lead the viewer to conclude that everything is compressed and that the drilling areas are adjacent to the bridge where the control consoles are located.  But, as the movie progresses, vast explosions in the drilling area involving enormous geysers of oil and mud are not even sensed in other  parts of the rig -- how is this possible?  We are not given any clear picture of the nature of the failure -- it has something to do with burping bubbles on the sea floor and the film is replete with images of sludge traveling up and down tubes.  But, at no point, can we figure out exactly what is happening or why. (This seems a consequence of intervention by lawyers to avoid BP defamation suits.)  Malkovich's character, who talks in a rich, husky Cajun accent, is conceived as a villain but we really don't have any sense at all what he has done wrong.  Because the part is played by Jon Malkovich, we suppose that the BP executive is supposed to be a bad guy, but the film is very skittish about the decisions made by this character and all of them seem rational in real time -- in fact, at one point, Wahlberg's character agrees that Malkovich is probably right when he decrees the cement sealing the system to be adequate.  Further, complicating the picture is the fact that the workers on the rig seem to be associated with different contractors -- the drill workers are employed by Schlumberger (pronounced weirdly as Schlum-bar-geray); in the closing credits, we learn that the hero doesn't even work for BP -- he is employed by Transocean.  Accordingly, we can't even tell who is responsible for what.  At no point was I able to figure out what was actually going on -- there are huge fires and lots of things falling from the air, but I couldn't figure out what triggered the disaster or who, if anyone, was responsible for it.  There is a scene in which someone heroically moves a crane or some big equipment in the midst of the firestorm and keeps the rig from falling on the life-boats.  This man, apparently a hero, pays for his courageous act, with his life.  But Berg's direction is so poor, we can't tell what the man is doing, or where he is working, or what is at stake.  The subject of the film is so intrinsically fascinating that the movie is somewhat interesting and the early shots of the rig and the logistics supporting the operation are intriguing.   It's a picture that makes you yearn for a first-rate documentary about this tragedy.