From the start, Deepwater Horizon is in over its head. The production budget sloshed past $100 million; the original director, J.C. Chandor was replaced because he had different ideas from the designs of the film’s producers, and replacement director Peter Berg is more predictably conventional. As a Hollywood producer once explained to me, when a $100 million is at stake, the money people get progressively nervous and they want thoughts of artistry to come from the basket of “tried and true,” and not from the basket of “let’s try something new and interesting.”
What they got is completely familiar. Deepwater Horizon is about the terrible explosions, fires, loss of life and horrendous environmental damage done when the drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded in 2010. It dumped millions of gallons of oil into the sea, fouled coastlines and so on. The movie is an old-fashioned disaster picture, like The Towering Inferno, so there’s no surprise that it starts chatty and intimate with a couple in bed, having amiable sex, and bantering with each other before Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) goes off to the Deepwater Horizon rig about 40 miles offshore, where the water is really deep.
But you don’t get too much small talk in the Williams home or on the rig itself, because this is only lead-up to the fireworks, which come soon enough. The arrogant and bullying Vidrine (John Malkovich), in charge of the drilling for British Petroleum, pressures the drillers, who know better, to do a careless last test on the cement cap that sits on the well thousands of feet underwater and contains the pressure so the well doesn’t just explode all the way up the pipe to the rig and the people on the surface.
This is how big budget disaster movies work – a little time to make a couple of characters endearing and then the calamity, which took a lot of that $100 million to film. The underwater shots show the cement cap leaking some bubbles, then bigger bubbles, then fragments of concrete, then bigger fragments, until for most of the rest of the movie, fire, chaos and flying chunks of material take over the film. If you forget that 11 human beings died in a preventable disaster caused by greed and arrogance, you might enjoy this orgy of fire and explosion. But if you can’t forget the actual cost in life and world in this event, the pyrotechnics feel obscene, and the actuality of the Deepwater Horizon disaster get lost in noise and distraction. In the financial calculus of a $100 million movie, though, elaborate explosions are more important than whether actual people died.
On the other hand, a low budget documentary called Command and Control by Robert Kenner shows more respect for the dead. This film is about an explosion in a missile silo in Arkansas in 1980 that was covered up for decades. A mechanic dropped a socket from his wrench – a big socket that weighed about 6 pounds. It fell 50 feet, punctured a fuel tank – and ultimately the whole caboodle blew sky high, although by a miracle the nine megaton warhead did not detonate.
The complex of greed and arrogance works differently in Command and Control compared to Deepwater Horizon. There was no literal profit motive afoot, although defense industries and the military itself have plenty of investment in our nuclear arsenal. And the arrogance of people who think that you can store such ghastly weapons without risk is way beyond simple foolishness.
Command and Control comes from a book, and it probably should have stayed a book. Soft-focus shots of socket wrenches falling in slow motion, and low-budget explosions may appeal to those averse to reading, but they don’t give the story any useful urgency.
So caught between the overhyped Deepwater Horizon and the underwhelming Command and Control, I’ll take neither. Sully is still playing, and there’s more good stuff on the way.
