Starring Mark Wahlberg. Rated 14A

Working from a New York Times piece that broke down the bad decisions leading to the worst environmental disaster in North American history, director Peter Berg reverse-engineers the 2010 explosion that killed 11 and injured 17, out of a crew of 126.

That crew is boiled down to electronics specialist Mike Williams, played with unshowy heroism by Mark Wahlberg. In real life, Mike’s wife looks like Margo Martindale more than she does Kate Hudson, but guess who the filmmakers chose to send the dude off for his next 21 days on a semisubmersible oil rig.The floating drill station in the Gulf of Mexico is leased out to British Petroleum, as represented by John Malkovich as an oily business shark with a Louisiana accent so thick, it makes its own mint juleps, and stirs them, too. Pushback comes from the rig’s safety boss, craggily played by Hudson’s stepdad, Kurt Russell.

Berg quickly individuates Mike’s colleagues, with the only female onboard, Gina Rodriguez’s tough tech operator, given a fair amount of dialogue. Still, between the petro-jargon and the consonant-free southernspeak that everyone mumbles, viewers can be forgiven for feeling underwater for the movie’s first half. The money shot comes about an hour in, when the pressure from below—which we see before anyone onboard does—overwhelms a drilling operation insufficiently tested, thanks to BP’s careless corner-cutting.

The subsequent events are as terrible, and terribly exciting, as you could want in a disaster story. While Deepwater makes it clear who let this horror happen, it makes no mention of the almost five million barrels of oil spilled, much of which is still in the gulf, accompanied by lakes of toxic chemical dispersant, with negative consequences for all life, and business, in the region. An only partially informed audience could walk out of this starkly engaging movie thinking that if BP had followed the safety procedure preferred by the valorous men and one woman portrayed here, everything would have been okay. But the crisis really began with the fantastically expensive decision not to leave that oil where it was.