April 2010. Electrician Mike Williams again leaves his family for a three-week assignment on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Operations are more than a month behind, and the company renting the platform, headed by the cynical Donald Vidrine, wants to accelerate the system to avoid losing profits. When the team insists on performing safety tests, it’s already too late: 5 million barrels of oil under their feet are ready to explode, creating one of the biggest oil disasters in history...

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Four years after releasing his popcorn flick Battleship, director Peter Berg is back on the high seas with a big budget movie that’s somewhat less dumb: the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people and caused a terrible oil spill in 2010. Of course you can’t expect too much of a movie that stars Mark Wahlberg and is filmed by a patriot; these are after all the two men behind Lone Survivor. The result is a disaster movie that barely touches on the political and environmental issues at the heart of the event, and the script seems embarrassed by the workers’ jargon, which is awkwardly applied. Still, Deepwater Horizon is a clearly and efficiently crafted Hollywood movie of the first order. Despite some scenes that are a little too chaotic to be understandable and the usual teary outbursts, the movie is captivating once the platform bursts into flame.