Sully, Everest (which I watched on the plane the day before), Patriots Day (for which I saw the trailer) and Deepwater Horizon – there seems to be a trend to dramatize recent real-life tragedies, and the formula is becoming somewhat predictable. There’s the Everyman in the lead – a guy just doing his job, albeit a rather specialized job demanding expertise as well as competence. And the wife, who adds nothing to the plot but is there to tug at the heartstrings: while I quite enjoyed the shots of Keira Knightley, I could have done without Laura Linney and Kate Hudson. Then there are the technical details, which are just beyond viewer understanding but are crucial to the outcomes. DH went a little overboard, so to speak, in this regard, with the characters speaking so fast we had trouble hearing what we couldn’t understand. And the calamity, too, was rather overdrawn; so that we were surprised that only 11 people died, instead of being saddened by the calamity. At the end, though, I felt I knew more about the event but hadn’t had a particularly memorable dramatic experience. The bad guys – BP execs – were caricatures (John Malkovich, anyone?), and there wasn’t a lot of clarity as to what went wrong, how it could have been prevented, or who, if anyone, were heroes. Questions abound.
