Not the best film of 2016, but certainly the most surprising one in that, you know, it's actually really good.

Going into a film like this with your thinking cap on is a mistake and in this case it's no different. Deepwater Horizon is as straightforward as it gets. It presents a fictionalised reality we have gotten to know so well by now. No real characters, but relatable stereotypes that behave exactly how you expect them to. Plot- and characterwise it never leaves 'been there, done that' territory.

The thing is, however, that as cliché as most of this is, it is an empathic cliché. By building up the entire first hour like a comfortably spread bed, the inevitability of…

In which two-thirds of Hollywood's greatest family steal the summer blockbuster that wasn't?

Baffling, in a summer of crap, underwhelming and under-performing blockbusters, that Deepwater Horizon was slung on halfway between summer and Christmas, especially considering how much they spent on this bloody thing.

After about 40 minutes, I was wondering where the hell the $165 million they spent on this went. I knew that everything was going to go mental in the second half, obviously, but not to the extent that they would end up spending that amount on the chaos that ensued. Yet when I saw the last half of this film, I could see where pretty much every penny went because it's jaw-dropping stuff.

I'm rarely impressed…

I’m not particularly excited about Hollywood feeling the need to make a feature film about every single story to get any sort of news coverage. And as far as the BP oil spill goes, this film covers what is probably the least interesting aspect of that immense and far reaching disaster. Do we get an examination of the people on the front line dealing with the obliterated wildlife and toxic cleanup efforts, trying to minimize the ecological fallout from the disaster? Or are we given a humanistic introspective showing the incalculable economic costs to the misfortunate Americans that were financially ruined from this SNAFU? Nope. If we are being honest, what we have here is 100 minutes of extraneous and…

“Hollywood has finally found someone to compete with Nazis for the title of ultimate movie villains: Oil executives. In Deepwater Horizon, the blue-collar crew of an off-shore rig battles malfunctioning equipment, unpredictable weather, blow outs, explosions, and fires. But all those dangers seem to pale in comparison to the threat posed by a bunch of starchy white men. In their uniform of button-down shirts and khaki pants, they’re the walking embodiment of unfeeling corporate greed.

In the wake of the disaster on the Deepwater Horizon, much of the news coverage centered on the catastrophic environmental disaster; oil flowed from the broken well for 87 days, leaking 210 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon puts the…

Over the last couple of years, Peter Berg has revived the American disaster film in quite an acute and visceral way. Whereas the classic disaster films of the 60s and 70s typically took place on home soil, and tested the ingenuity of American infrastructure and procedure when taken to their limits, Berg’s recent releases have played more like a variety of war film, testifying to soldiers, in the broadest sense, who are fighting on a national front that has dissolved, dispersed and moved away from the traditional ideas of frontal combat and discrete military engagements. For that reason, his outlook has been peculiarly suited to deal with environmental catastrophe and terrorism as the two most looming threats to the continuing…