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…

Telling the story of what would become one of the worst ecological disasters in US history, Peter Berg's "Deepwater Horizon" is a drama that is at its best when it observes the tensions between greed, the individual, and nature's fury. That depth, though not explored in enough detail to make the film great, undergirds a well-assembled and often riveting piece of works that functions both as an epic of the working individual and a cautionary tale where Mother Earth is not something with which to toy.

Revolving around the 2010 Gulf of Mexico-based oil platform fire that took the lives of workers and let loose millions of gallons of crude into the sea, Berg's film follows the action from the…

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig malfunctioned causing a vast oil leak in the gulf of Mexico which was covered by the media for months. The malfunction also killed 11 people,

The film version focuses on the second fact, not on the first, and turns this story into a somewhat conventional disaster movie, complete with heroic working-class engineers (played by Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell), weaselly corporate higher ups (embodied principally by John Malkovich, relishing an extreme Texas accent), And as a big-budget disaster movie, it works effectively enough - the heroics are suitably heroic, the disaster suitably disastrous and the panic and tension in the moment grips effectively.

It's in the bigger picture where things don't work as…