At its heart, ‘Deepwater Horizon’ is an old-fashioned disaster movie

“Deepwater Horizon” is one of two big-budget movies that will battle it out for box office supremacy.

“Deepwater Horizon,” of course, is about the worst oil spill in history. An oil rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana in 2010 killed 11 workers and spilled 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

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Producer and star Mark Wahlberg said he wanted the movie to focus not on the environmental devastation but rather on the professional men and women who where working the rig at the time of the accident. That’s more or less true. We get to know a handful of people — the hands-on employees doing the grimy work of manipulating the massive machinery, the managers responsible for overseeing the operations, and the sleazy executives who cut corners to feed their bottom line.

But what the movie really is about is the massive explosion, or explosions. And they are spectacular. Especially in IMAX. The propulsive mud that first shoots up out of the pipeline is like a volcano, smashing windows and slamming workers into walls and equipment. Then more explosions, cracking apart sections of the rig itself, followed by fires breaking out everywhere, some shooting hundreds of feet in the air. And against this hellish background, the people we’ve gotten to know scramble to save their lives. It’s all pretty thrilling.

At its heart, “Deepwater Horizon” is an old-fashioned disaster movie. “The Towering Inferno” on water, if you will. It’s not much more than that. The characters are well-acted but they’re thinly drawn. But it’s definitely a spectacle.

Much of Deepwater’s $156-million budget went to the special effects department in order to make the real-life disaster as realistic as possible. Meanwhile, its box office opponent, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” tries to make a fantastical world just as realistic.