‘The Burning Sea’ Review: A Sequel to ‘The Wave’ and ‘The Quake,’ This Norwegian Disaster Movie Is Competent in an Overly Familiar Way
23.02.2022 - 04:57
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn “The Burning Sea,” which is your basic, everyday Norwegian oil-rig disaster thriller, Stian (Henrik Bjelland), a rig worker stationed on a drilling platform that’s about to collapse, must descend into the bowels of the rig to shut down a well that can’t be reached remotely. As the soundtrack fills with one of those flatulent brass musical scores that sounds like it’s heralding the arrival of the devil, a bureaucratically ominous title splashes across the screen: “D Shaft, Gullfaks A, 138 meters under the sea.” 138 meters? That’s pretty far down, though not necessarily deep enough to be, you know, scary.The disaster film started off as a “realistic” genre, one that gradually grew more over-the-top.
(The earthquake in “Earthquake,” released in 1974, doesn’t look like the apocalypse; about the worst thing that happens during it is that a highway collapses.) In recent decades, though, directors like Roland Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012”) have accustomed us to the earthly-disaster-as-digital-ride. You could say it’s refreshing that “The Burning Sea,” the third in a series of not-so-over-the-top Norwegian disaster films, following “The Wave” and “The Quake” (this one, like “The Quake,” was directed by John Andreas Andersen), goes back to basics.
It’s a movie about a giant oil spill, and it doesn’t hype (or, at least, not much) what it shows us. The hook of “The Burning Sea” is, or is supposed to be, its shaggy-actor Norwegian realism: the fact that it’s a disaster movie that shuns disaster-movie bombast.
The reason that’s more intriguing in theory than in practice is that the film turns out to be a very standard series of rescue-mission operations. When 30 drilling platforms in
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