‘The Burning Sea’ Review: A Sequel to ‘The Wave’ and ‘The Quake,’ This Norwegian Disaster Movie Is Competent in an Overly Familiar Way
variety.comOwen 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.
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