The Burning Sea Review: A Disaster Movie That Plays Straight from the Genre Playbook

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

The Burning Sea
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

As a disaster film about human-made catastrophe, John Andreas Andersen’s The Burning Sea is drawn from a tried-and-true genre playbook. Just about its only unique element is its setting on the Norwegian Sea, and it opens intriguingly enough with an unnamed man explaining how, in 1971, he began working on what was, at the time, one of the world’s largest oil fields (presumably a reference to the real-life the Forties Oil Field).

If this is a mock talking-head interview, the film doesn’t show its hand. The interviewee’s words are ominously accompanied by archival footage of men working on an oil rig, and the moment practically suggests that The Burning Sea will take some kind of hybrid approach to its material. From there, though, Anderson drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as the film settles into a rote, fictionalized account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

The Burning Sea’s three-act structure predictably consists of establishing a sense of small-town normalcy before then having it be upended by sudden disaster—until it’s more or less restored by the incredibly intrepid derring-do of a small group of individuals. That the film is rooted in an unremarkable family drama, and replete with the kind of handheld cinematography that was feeling more than a little stale by the time that Paul Greengrass made The Bourne Supremacy over 15 years ago, proves even more wearisome.

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Sofia (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who works for Eelume Offshore Robotics, has started a new relationship with Stian (Nils Elias Olsen), who proves his bona fides each morning by making breakfast for her and Odin (Nils Elias Olsen), his young son. After an evening barbeque by the sea with friends and co-workers, disaster strikes when an explosion cripples an oil rig, and Sofia and her colleague, Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen), are sent in to investigate. Making their way underwater through wreckage and dead bodies, they discover that the rig is leaking gas, which eventually causes another explosion that kills even more people.

Andersen’s directorial hand is sturdy enough, but The Burning Sea sinks under the weight of its leaden pacing and melodramatic touches, not to mention its familiarity to the filmmaker’s prior The Quake, in which domestic contentment is also dramatically shaken to its core by human-made disaster. The script, by John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg, leans heavily into expositional dialogue exchanges and harrowing action sequences, but takes little time to lay any groundwork for social or political commentary. In the end, the only burning question here is which of the principal characters will be alive by the time the credits roll.

Score: 
 Cast: Kristine Kujath Thorp, Henrik Bjelland, Rolf Kristian Larsen, Nils Elias Olsen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Bjørn Floberg  Director: John Andreas Andersen  Screenwriter: Harald Rosenløw-Eeg  Distributor: Magnet Releasing  Buy: Video

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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