Disaster movies are out of fashion. The time when spectators were ready to tremble by the millions for a jumbo jet, a cruise ship or a skyscraper in flames has passed for almost forty years. Disasters have not given up, biding their time to find their way back to the screens. This one goes through the pandemic of films “inspired by real events”.
What could be more real than an eruption, an earthquake, a storm? Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has mobilized the necessary resources to recreate the disaster that destroyed, in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010, the largest oil platform ever built, Deepwater Horizon, causing eleven deaths and causing a gigantic black tide.
The skepticism that the company could inspire dissipates over the course of a story of exemplary pedagogical clarity. This instant apocalypse makes for a great thriller. It is also a terrifying reflection of human madness.
What Peter Berg shows is the insane recklessness of these humans who are going to dig holes in the bottom of the sea in gigantic tanks ready to burst, with the certainty that their technology will never fail and that, in the event of a glitch , they will be smarter and stronger than the elements. The embodiment of this hubris falls here to John Malkovich, who plays Donald Vidrine, the British Petroleum executive who preferred to do without a few additional checks rather than delay another project.
Superiority of real sets
The screenplay by Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan details the sequence of these decisions, but also the state of disrepair of the platform. The first part of Deepwater thus resembles a corporate documentary, which would have been made by an environmentalist perfectly familiar with the practices of the oil company. As it is, in addition, brightened up by the presence of stars clearly convinced of doing useful work, we arrive safely at the fateful hour.
The superiority of real sets over digital images is manifested in all its glory. Deepwater revives the tradition of disaster films with terrifying brilliance. While they only occupy a small fraction of the film, these hellish moments seem to stretch out. We remember, among other things, these shots which show a bird covered in oil crashing into the portholes of a ship that has come to the rescue.
This catastrophe, the one played by Mark Wahlberg – he plays Deepwater Horizon engineer Mike Williams – was filmed to amaze, but it is told with enough integrity to force us to return to the real catastrophe. , the one that killed eleven rig workers, destroyed the seabed and the coasts, and the unquenchable greed that is at its origin.
