Welled Up: DEEPWATER HORIZON

Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon is a compelling, workmanlike, gearhead recreation of a tragedy that was a prelude to an ecological disaster. He’s not so much concerned with artificially inflated human drama or even in the resulting fallout from the 2010 deep sea oil rig explosion that left several BP employees dead while millions of gallons of crude gushed into the ocean. Berg’s films (from Friday Night Lights to Battleship) are always most interested in group efforts. This one’s about systems failing, and a group who must survive as best they can when it blows up in their faces. There’s the usual disaster movie opening acts which introduce a variety of recognizable actors showing up to work on the rig and the various tensions slowly straining between the men who are there to put in hard work and the men who are there to cut corners. The sharply drawn division between the laborers and the money men put me in mind of The Towering Inferno, while the somber just-the-facts tick-tock of daily routine felt more in line with the grim United 93. The synthesis of these two approaches is compelling enough, but the movie really comes alive when it all blows up.

Because Berg and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan (World War Z) and Matthew Sand (Ninja Assassin) take such an interest in the mechanics of the Deepwater Horizon in the movie’s throat-clearing beginning, with loving looks at the machinery including a camera sliding up the main pipe’s muddy buildup like a colonoscopy, there’s no need for belabored explanation later. Because they let us know how it’s supposed to work, they can let the pressure build until the rig erupts. We know what’s wrong. The way there provides human stakes, letting us watch good average capable workaday guys trying their hardest to make the task of seemingly impossible corporate orders – personified by meek dopes in polo shirts – work anyway. There’s Mark Wahlberg doing his earnest best, and Kurt Russell commanding attention and respect (and rocking a fine mustache). There’s no-nonsense Gina Rodriguez and sweet Dylan O’Brien and kind Ethan Suplee. They’re likable, but then there’s John Malkovich, bald and chewing through a splendid accent as the guy from the head office willing to push forward without completing all the necessary safety checks. Even if you didn’t know where this is going, you’d know where this is going.

You’d certainly know something’s about to blow if you paid attention to the heavy-handed foreshadowing. Before leaving for the rig, Wahlbeg and his wife (Kate Hudson) watch their adorable moppet show off her visual aid for a career day explanation of her dad’s job. It’s a Coke can she manipulates like it’s underground undersea oil. As the scene ends, the can ominously explodes. Later, Russell is handed a safety award by visiting company men, a scene crosscut with Malkovich barking at underlings to ignore a warning about unsafe pressure in the pumps. So the movie lays it on a little thick. But when the danger flares, the movie’s ready to turn its eye on knobs, dials, gears, switches, buttons, keys, screens, alarms, propellers, tubes, signals, readouts, levers, and more into watching every one fail. As the whole oil rig comes crashing down around the characters, they spring into action, trying to contain the mess or, failing that, getting themselves and their co-workers to safety. Everyone on screen is coated in grease, mud, and blood. It becomes a loud, cacophonous series of explosive sequences, one perilous development leading inexorably to the next as everything falls apart.

There are political points to be made through a story like this, but Berg keeps that ambiguous. It’s a celebration of hardworking human spirit and a condemnation of heartless profit motives driving them to doom. It’s a business calamity with bloody casualties, bailed out by civic good. We see the coast guard fly into action (an echo of Sully, the other recent-event-turned-movie of the moment), and the people on board the rig do all they can to help their fellow workers. There’s a thrill to watch such dramatic life-and-death circumstances play out on the big screen, the effects large and convincing, the booming sound design rattling the theater seats with every new blast of the inferno. But there’s also sadness to the spectacle. When one man sacrifices himself to stop a piece of equipment from falling on others, Berg holds close on his wincing face, then watches as he’s blown out a window, smacking into a bulkhead on his way out of sight. I fleetingly wondered what it would be like for the real man’s family to see this movie, and I hoped they wouldn’t. And yet the movie is so effectively produced, I was fascinated by its every development, as the best laid plans of men go horribly wrong in spectacular fashion.

Dawn of the Zed: WORLD WAR Z

Hollywood’s latest rehearsal of total worldwide destruction is World War Z, a globetrotting zombie film that approaches the zombie problem as a plague to be contained and cured. It has more in common with the techno-thriller novels (turned films, usually) of Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain – than the gross-out shock satire horror films of George Romero – Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead. In the detail-oriented, goal-driven throughline, we follow a representative of the United Nations played by Brad Pitt travelling through countries ravaged by zombie attacks hot on the trail of Patient Zero and, hopefully, a way towards understanding the outbreaks in order to stop them. The film is grimly satisfying, hopping from one nice suspense sequence to the next, treating the destruction soberly and the stakes with a sad weight.

It works because of the humane star power of Pitt. He’s playing a role that Robert Redford or Warren Beatty would have played if it was made in the 1970s with, say, Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack behind the camera. Pitt’s aged into a still, strong, warm everyman persona very well. In this film he’s a man defined by his profession, a humanitarian, and his family, a wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove). His crisis-activated goals dovetail easily. He wants to keep his family safe and stop the developing worldwide calamity as best he can. That’s easier said than done, which gives us more than enough reason to root him on as he reluctantly leaves his family in the care of a refuge ship and flies around the world in a military plane, stopping in various countries, trying to trace the outbreak back to its source. At each stop, zombie attacks are inevitable. He meets character actors (like David Morse, Peter Capaldi, and Fana Mokoena) with helpful information (or not) to impart and traces the mystery as far as he can. Then zombies swarm into the picture in moments built out of small jolts and massive setpieces, and we’re off to the next stop.

Loosely based on a novel by Max Brooks, the film’s troubled production caused it to take on screenwriters like a sinking ship takes on water. The end result gives story credit to such heavy-hitters as Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom), Drew Goddard (Cloverfield), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5). That makes it hard to say who I should credit with coming up with tremendously effective sequences like the opening in downtown Philadelphia in which a traffic jam erupts in violence, or the late-night rainstorm attack on a darkened runway, or the scene in which a tidal wave of zombies scramble like ants against a protective wall meant to keep them out. Director Marc Forster, used to helming prestige dramas (Finding Neverland), likable mainstream oddities (Stranger Than Fiction), and widely disliked Bond films (Quantum of Solace), along with editors Roger Barton and Matt Chesse, have somehow created a film that’s slick and propulsive all the same. Some combination of rewrites, reedits, and reshoots has left the film shiny and slick, with little evidence of behind the scenes squabbles.

Creepy and overflowing with horrifying imagery both on-screen and, more often, implied, World War Z has such an overwhelming approach to its devastation that it’s wise to keep it small on a scene to scene basis. We get the impression that calamities are occurring without needing endless shots of total disaster to understand. (Though there is one of those big disaster-movie control room maps that light up the biggest problem areas in red. I always like picking out my area of the country on those things just to make sure I’d be caught up in any given mess.) As we dash around the world following the main mission, I appreciated the matter-of-fact global respect on display here as characters from different countries and backgrounds get to be real people instead of stereotypes. Also appreciated is the way in which the filmmakers understood and valued the effect of the large-scale havoc they conjure. It’s not cheapened into a tunnel vision hero’s tale with collateral damage brushed aside as long as the wife and kids are fine in the end. The burden of stopping this plague weighs heavy on Pitt’s shoulders.

And this is no usual zombie plague of shuffling undead. The zombie effects are modern and twitchy, the once-human creatures swarming like deadly insects and chattering their dead jaws with bone-snapping sound effects. This makes for a primal, animalistic dread in their heavily-CG pack behavior, but it’s never mined for the kind of body-horror, living-dead drama so successfully vivid in Romero’s films or Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its sequel. Here the zombie virus is nothing more than an existential threat. It could be anything, even the flu of Soderbergh’s Contagion or the aliens of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. In fact, WWZ often plays like a clever cross of those two better films. But it’s also a competent success all on its own, a kind of gripping summer blockbuster that kicks up a great deal of mood and suspense in moments intense and frightening, before fizzling out slightly into the end credits. The effect doesn’t linger, but it’s strong and engaging enough while it lasts.