Critic Reviews

By taking its time setting the stakes for all involved, when the action strikes, its impact is witnessed more through the cast rather than a cadre of CGI explosions.

Any time you can top your tale of crisis, calamity and heroism with sacrifice, pathos and a hopeful message, you call that a “win,” in Hollywood or Aelsund.

The Burning Sea may ultimately be too uptight for its own good, but there’s enough here to satisfy disaster aficionados who’ve already been here before and only really want to root for more of the same.

For a movie so intuitively captivating, so visually extravagant, it very nearly papers over all its emotional weaknesses.

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.

We get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.

The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.

The film as a whole, though, never hits as hard as it should. The characters are too stock — generic enough that their personalities won’t distract from the looming apocalyptic trouble.

A regular beat of tension and release plays out as people get saved only to face new dangers, following the template of disaster films since the beginning of cinema, but it’s done well here. The visual effects are impressive, especially the water, which is so notoriously hard to animate.