Deep Sea Catastrophe: A documentary-style disaster movie

This article first published the Barcelona movie app and was written after watching the media field last week. The original text of the

movie "Deep Sea Catastrophe" held its media premiere in Beijing yesterday. Although the main plot and ending of the movie can be guessed for a long time, it was still shocked during the watching process. The flames rising across the screen. As a disaster film, this is undoubtedly a success.


The film is based on real events, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that shocked the world six years ago.

On April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, on a semi-submersible oil rig named "Deepwater Horizon", 126 staff worked as usual. The Macondo oil well they were exploited has not yet been completed, and the construction period has been delayed and the budget has been overrun. BP, which leased the rig, disagreed with the supervisor in charge of oil well construction. The former ignores the safety hazard report and hopes that workers can rush to work as soon as possible.

At around 9:45 that night, a blowout, explosion and fire broke out, and 11 people were killed. The drilling platform sank after 36 hours of burning, and a large amount of oil leaked, which became the most serious oil spill in American history and caused a major ecological disaster in the region. At the time, US President Barack Obama stated that the impact of this disaster was no less than 9/11.


After the incident, the world was shocked. Most of the media focused on the ecological damage caused by a large amount of crude oil spills in the area, but only a few media paid attention to the 11 ordinary workers who were killed in the accident. It is for this reason that the director Peter Berg made this completely documentary film.

In the process of directing, director Peter Berg emphasized that the film must be faithful to the facts. To this end, he visited the families of 11 victims one by one. During the conversation, he felt the grief of the loss of their beloved ones, but also the hardships they had to face in life.


In an interview, the director said: This encourages me, because when I meet with the families of the victims, I can tell them honestly and clearly that all I want to do is to truthfully put the night’s experience on the big screen, so that the audience can understand these victims. Ignored the plot.

Also in order to strive for reality, the director refused to use computer special effects technology to set the scene. Instead, he built a 1:1 real scene in a reservoir-a large oil rig. He even removed the screen, buttons and installation from the real rig. In the control room in the set, make sure everything is realistic. This is probably the main purpose of the film's budget of up to 100 million US dollars.


The director believes: Rebuilding the drilling platform not only allows the actors and behind-the-scenes personnel to participate in it, but also wants every audience to feel the hard working and living environment of the drilling platform. However, Peter Berg also clarified that he did not exclude the use of computer special effects. A large number of blowouts, explosions, and fire scenes in the movie are still completed with special effects.

Being loyal to the facts will inevitably make sacrifices in the plot of the story. Although the director himself thinks that the huge disaster that occurred within 12 hours of the night is sufficiently dramatic, the first half of the film still makes people feel a little boring, and the main characters walk through the scene like an assembly line.

As the protagonist, Mark Wahlberg plays an engineer in the movie, but he is always in an awkward supporting role in the first half of the plot. He can only show his protagonist aura in the later rescue plot. . For example, in the key plot of the dispute between the drilling platform and the oil company, his speech only played a role in shaking up the burden. Instead, the two old actors Kurt Russell and John Malkovich were tit-for-tat and their acting skills were compelling. .


In addition, the flat and straightforward plot arrangement, everything is within expectation. As mentioned earlier, this is a movie that knows the main plot before watching it; and the climax part of the movie relies entirely on special effects and pictures instead of the plot. So as a disaster film, it is successful; but as a film trying to record or reflect on this disaster, it is still somewhat powerless.


Obviously, the film did not focus too much on the accountability process after the accident and the problem of saving the ecology, and even from the perspective of the victims, it showed relatively little. At the end of the movie, the surviving protagonist was questioned by the families of the victims and left in a hurry. Then the subtitles appeared, and the names and photos of the 11 victims were displayed on the big screen one by one.


Of course, all of this is consistent with the director's original idea, just simply showing the whole process of this disaster and the sacrifices made by every unknown hero in this process. Therefore, on the one hand, the film is not as entertaining as the general Hollywood blockbusters, and on the other hand, it is not overly elevated in subjective thought and ideology.


In the end, some viewers may have some doubts about the working process of the deep-sea oil rig in the movie. The movie explains this vividly through the protagonist’s daughter:

the oil on the seabed was formed by the dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago. , They are like a monster, always looking for an exit. The oil rig gave them this exit, and used various equipment to control this monster to prevent it from gushing unscrupulously. When the drilling platform is completed, the oil company will come for oil extraction and transportation.


Simply put, it is like a can of coke that has been shaken. A pipe is inserted at the upper end and honey is poured into it to temporarily seal it. The key to the movie is that this equipment has failed due to substandard quality, and what really spews out is not Coke, but mud, gravel, crude oil, methane, and the big monster that has been squeezed for hundreds of millions of years.

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