 The documentary of the same name from 2019 tells the harrowing story of a rescue mission within the rough, churning North Sea, highlighting one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet - one many of us, including myself, are sort of oblivious to until a story like this comes along. We realize how these people put their lives at risk to help the rest of the world. I didn't know about this story until this film started getting advertised, and it has given me a whole new respect for these brave people we take for granted daily.
Saturation diving is a technique of deep-sea diving that allows the divers to work at crushing depths of up to 1000 ft. to maintain things like off-shore oil rigs and underwater pipelines. To explain it in more detail, just as I did for the documentary review, here's a link to the Wiki article on the subject. Beyond the basics, it's a bit complicated for me, but it seems a complex process nonetheless. The kind of process where if you screw up one minute detail, it could be considerably dangerous or even life-threatening. According to diver Chris Lemons' (Finn Cole) then fiancee, Morag (Bobby Rainsbury), saturation diving is a lot like going to space but underwater. Things start as a business-as-usual scenario as Chris boards the ship he's to work from, greeting friend and fellow diver Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) and eventually meeting a rather cold individual named David Yuasa (Simu Liu), who will be diving with them on a job to repair an underwater gas line manifold. While on the job, a storm starts brewing above, but they continue, as it's still "divable." The three divers use a diving bell that fits the three of them. While Chris and David go to work on the manifold, at eerie, pitch-black depths with just a little flashlight on their diving suits to help them, Duncan stays in the bell to monitor them and feed their umbilicals, which supply a combo of oxygen and helium (heliox), warmth and communication. While they set to work, the storm makes their vessel's Dynamic Positioning System glitch, causing the ship to drift, dragging the bell with Duncan inside and the umbilicals of David, who manages to scramble back to the bell, and Chris, who isn't quite so lucky. As the ship drifts, Chris' umbilical gets caught and eventually snaps, leaving him with just ten minutes of backup air in the pitch blackness of the depths of the North Sea. His only hope is to find the manifold and climb to its top to await Dave's rescue, which is much easier said than done, considering the circumstances. The entire team pulls together to get Chris back to his fiancee alive, brainstorming what to do with limited resources due to the ship's electric malfunction. Things get pretty intense. Of course, the film takes a few liberties, but it doesn't miss either. It does a good job of adapting the documentary into a Hollywood film, and whatever liberties they seem to take make sense to try to make things more exciting. But at least they don't have, like, some surprise shark attack that never happened or something. I'm talking more about making the storm look rougher than it may have been or dramatizing the characters who participated in the event a bit more. Nothing bad at all. So, points for that. One particular thing about the documentary and the feature film is that if you don't know the story yet and are interested, I recommend checking out the documentary first. It's easy to find online if you know where to look. But it'll give you a much better appreciation for the real people involved, as you can sense the camaraderie between the divers, namely Chris and Duncan, and you'll come to notice while watching the film here that they splice in some of the actual footage from the doc to make things a bit more authentic. I'm glad I checked this whole story out. As mentioned earlier, I now have a new appreciation for these workers. 4/5
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