“Deepwater Horizon” was adapted from the New York Times’ article “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours”, which was published on December 25, 2010 (Image provided by Summit Entertainment).

Owen Johnson
Connector Staff

This movie may just be one of the best examples of a film that turns a real life event with plenty of untapped story potential into something extremely generic.

Based on the real events of the 2010 BP oil spill, “Deepwater Horizon” chronicles the actions and mistakes that were made on the day of April 20, 2010 that led to the explosion and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The worst and most generic part of the movie by far is the characters. Mark Wahlberg plays generic lead character who the filmmakers feel they have to make father/husband of the year in order to get the audience to care about them. John Malkovich plays generic businessman who is extremely sleazy and profit-hungry to the point of it being somewhat comical, and a little bit offensive and unfair towards the actual person Malkovich is portraying. Gina Rodriguez plays Andrea Fleytas, who for some reason is given the generic character problem of having a car that does not work when her character barely has anything to do through the whole movie and is not really important in the grand scheme of things.

That said, the issues with the characters could be excused if the actors portraying them gave good performances. Unfortunately, aside from Kurt Russell who almost always does a good job, the other main actors are pretty bad. Malkovich is overacting, making his already comically-simplified character even more comical. Then there is Wahlberg, who just never sounds genuine and rushes through his lines so all of his words form one long, incoherent word. A number of the minor actors also have the problem that Wahlberg has where their dialogue is incoherent and incomprehensible due to their attempted accents or because they do not enunciate well.

Two positive things I can say about the movie is that it looks and sounds nice. The effects are believable and the sound is perfectly edited so that it never feels too loud, too quiet, or drowns out any of the actors like the sound editing in “Sully” did.

It is important to note that while I do think that the filmmakers poorly handled the material, I do not think there was any malice intended on their part. Based on the actions of the characters (except Malkovich’s) portrayed in the movie, and the tribute to the 11 people that died in the actual disaster, I think their intentions were to make as good of a tribute film to the people involved as they could.

Unfortunately, “Deepwater Horizon” is an involuntary misstep in an attempt to make something worthwhile that could act as a tribute to the people who died on April 20, 2010.

Final Grade: C-