Peter Berg is an odd duck. He’s often written off as a journeyman director, an anti-auteur without any specific style or calling, but he also tends to get lumped into the “style over substance” gang with the likes of Michel Bay and McG. I don’t think either of those interpretations is quite on the money, and it’s telling that you can find such a wide range of opinion when looking over his filmography. This is the guy who brought us the working-class gem Friday Night Lights (both the film and the show) and the movie version of Battleship in which aliens try to sink Liam Neeson’s battleship (Battleship).
Berg is a proficient, inventive action director, as evidenced by 2003’s criminally underrated The Rundown, but he’s also not above a bland, Call of Duty–style counterterrorism procedural like 2007’s The Kingdom. He did the “bros behaving badly” comedy about 10 years before The Hangover with Very Bad Things, and his superhero deconstruction flick Hancock was released just months after Iron Man in 2008. That’s an enormous range within the span of a decade—in style, quality, and a willingness to take risks on unproven concepts.
So taking all of that into consideration, is Berg the best guy to tell the story of one of the worst industrial accidents in our nation’s history, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and discharge of nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico?