#REVIEW Mark Wahlberg delivers in “Deepwater Horizon”

When you hear someone say Deepwater Horizon, you probably envision the same imagery as most people; wildlife covered in oil and birds flapping in vain along a white sandy beach, struggling to fly. White sandy beaches painted with black tar as far as the eyes can see, and an unfathomable cost of cleanup. It’s human nature to relate to these disasters in terms of their impact. Billions of dollars in damages, millions of animals killed, an environmental disaster on an unprecedented scale that we will forever associate with the outright greed and hubris of the oil industry.

So, I took a date to this movie and even she said “movies are terrible for first dates!”, and she’s normally right. It actually turned out to be the perfect scenario because she practices corporate insurance law and the Deepwater Horizon was a major focus of her education. From her perspective, the Deepwater Horizon was taught as a cautionary tale about fiscal risk and monetary loss; it’s the epitome of lessons about profit and risk, and the conversation it stimulated between us was incredible.

The movie itself opens on a typical American family. Mark Wahlberg is allowed the comedic freedom to really play himself in spirit and that natural bit of roughneck humour and attitude made me personally fall in love with him and his family right away. From there, the grandeur of the film builds quickly. Every shot is meticulously filmed and edited to inspire a sense of scale and awe that a disaster movie of this size deserves. There’s roaring footage of a helicopter flying above a waveless ocean and there’s underwater footage of massive propellers and infrastructure that I had no idea existed beneath a drilling platform.

The beauty of this film, and the reason that I will absolutely recommend it to everyone I know, is that the disaster, the scale, the sheer sense of overwhelming doom is used solely as a backdrop for the stories of the people within. This movie shares with us the unimaginable bravery, unwavering humanity, and courage in the face of certain death that the crew of the Deepwater Horizon showed for one another. The real tragedy with large scale disasters is that we as a society lose these sagas of each individual who was there and this film brings them back to life.

The crew of the Deepwater Horizon spent a night aboard a blazing inferno of hellfire with explosions and searing hot metal raining down upon them, tearing apart the ship like a bullet through paper. This film helps us understand the journey that the crew took that night to survival or death. It’s a reminder that when faced with impossible odds, we find the courage to do what needs to be done, and to cherish every moment we are allowed with our loved ones.

When you realize what happened to those people, the moral of corporate hubris and greed becomes self-evident. It is so easy for a company; an entity without a soul, to approve the risk of losing lives for faster or larger profits. You leave the theatre questioning why we allow this to happen and you feel like your own soul is covered in spilled oil.

We should all be listening carefully, because 11 people died to deliver us this message. Luckily, we can now watch their stories and be a part of their final journey aboard the Deepwater Horizon. The rest is on us.

Elevation Pictures and TARO PR releases Deepwater Horizon on Friday, Sept 30, 2016

[Written by Adam Pauze]