Mark Reviews Movies: THE BURNING SEA

The Burning Sea, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 24, 2022

The makers of The Burning Sea clearly aren't fans of their country's oil drilling policy and efforts. The movie opens with a bit of history: A large oil field was discovered by the Norwegian government in the North Sea in 1969, and over the ensuing decades, exploration and extraction have only escalated. This speculative story of imminent and inevitable disaster, set in the present day, imagines how those decades of economic prosperity, at the cost of irrevocably altering environment, could quickly turn into a century's worth of unthinkable ruin. Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Lars Gudmestad's screenplay never feels as angry or as urgent as its real-world foundation and fictional stakes suggest, though.

Here, a lot of time is spent building up to the disaster, establishing thin characters and broad relationships, and deflecting from the bigger impact of what greed and a lack of foresight have caused with some smaller-scale drama. It all feels trivial by comparison. In other words, John Andreas Andersen's movie is a generic disaster story that ultimately ignores and undermines its own larger intentions.

The main events revolve around a small group of people from various fields involving and levels of oil drilling. The central figure is Sofia (a very effective Kristine Kujath Thorp), who works at a robotics company that specializes in underwater-exploration technology. She's dating Stian (Henrik Bjelland), a widower and single father, who works on one of the hundreds of drilling platforms run by a single company in the North Sea. They're in love, but Sofia is hesitant about taking the relationship to the next step, if only because it gives her something to prove to herself when things go wrong.

To some extent, they go wrong on account of the oil company's head William Lie (Bjørn Floberg), who has been working up through the business since the initial discovery. An oil platform collapses, so William calls in Sofia and her supportive co-worker Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen) to search for survivors, using a pretty nifty—and apparently real—remote-controlled snake-like device.

Upon searching the wreckage and examining the cause of a massive explosion in the aftermath, the two determine that the sudden rush of natural gas points to a much bigger problem with the entire drilling operation: a giant fissure across the seafloor that could damage those hundreds of platforms, harm or kill thousands of workers, and release an untold amount of oil into the sea. On advice from experts and a government official, William shuts down operations, but it's too late for Stian, who is either dead or trapped somewhere in a rig. When company refuses to order a search-and-rescue effort, Sofia takes matters into her own hands.

The grounded, personal level of storytelling works to the narrative's benefit at first, especially in helping to make the causes and potential impact of the forthcoming environmental catastrophe more convincing. The basic logic and explanation of the fissure and the oil spill that could—well, will, obviously—result are sound, even if the screenwriters evade assigning blame (It could be climate change or the impact of the drilling itself, which feels like a distinction without a difference in a few significant ways) and overly simplify the consequences of what could happen. The visual effects are certainly convincing, especially when the fissure opens up, creating a long, terrifying vortex that pulls in a ship and sucks down a section of rig platform.

All of this mostly believable exposition and rising tension, though, ends up in service of a more straightforward race-against-the-clock thriller. First, Sofia and Arthur, who sneak aboard the remnants of the platform where her boyfriend is trapped, have to determine Stian's fate, since William doesn't want to unnecessarily risk lives for what seems to be a hopeless cause. Then, they have to find a way off the rig, before the eponymous event arrives.

Meanwhile, William works against the rescue and treats Stian and his loved ones (The screenplay seems to create relatives from background characters out of nowhere) with a level of corporate coldness. To a certain extent, the guy has a point about all of this, which is an unfortunate thing to say about the human antagonist in a movie like this (William's two final scenes in the movie more or less give him a pass for the entirety of the mess, anyway). The movie's contrived rescue plot and the rather illogical, half-thought plans by the rescuers ultimately overshadow the movie's bigger points about the consequences of unfettered drilling and unaccountable corporate entities.

The central point—that expansive oil drilling could have more immediate and larger consequences than we have seen or imagined—is apparent and, in the movie's most impressively staged sequences, frightening. The Burning Sea may never lose sight of that simple message, but the filmmakers definitely sacrifice an examination and critique of the problem's root causes for some easy melodrama and action.

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