Need a good thriller, a disaster film that’ll pull at those heart strings? “Deepwater Horizon” knows just how to do that, depicting the oil rig team at the center of U.S. drilling’s worst hour. You’ll feel quite a bit throughout the modest runtime, but you probably won’t need to think much. And that can be OK.

Mark Wahlberg, stars as Mike Williams in “Deepwater Horizon,” a film about the worst underwater oil rig drilling disaster in U.S. history. (photo courtesy of Participant Media)

The 2010 BP oil spill – the worst in U.S. history – remains the pinnacle of negligence, a cautionary story for big business that shows just how bad things can get when big wigs encourage short cuts in place of safety. That’s where “Deepwater Horizon” begins once protagonists Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) and Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) board the floating rig.

Safety inspections? No one needs them with the hubris of the company behind the spill entirely embodied in BP rep Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich), depicted with a pompous Southern drawl to make him quite deplorable. He has all the right answers when drilling tests don’t produce the results he needs and enough corporate clout to usher in an ecological nightmare.

We all know where this is going, but the film still takes time to establish characters like Williams and his wife Felicia (Kate Hudson) and Caleb Holloway (Dylan O’Brien), who probably should have taken that full ride to college instead. Truly, it’s all bare minimum character development leading up to the suspenseful climax.

This is textbook brisk pacing. And when the inevitable blowout occurs, the visual experience is enough to provide a minute glimpse into the horrors witnessed by victims and survivors.

Director Peter Berg is on a hot streak, finding his niche in depicting recent stories of heroism like 2013’s “Lone Survivor” and next year’s “Patriots Days,” focusing on the Boston Marathon bombing. In some ways, he’s the perfect filmmaker for such films since he doesn’t approach them with obvious political leanings. He merely tells stories drenched in melodrama.

Kurt Russell appears as Jimmy Harrell, also known as Mr. Jimmy, in “Deepwater Horizon.” (photo courtesy of Participant Media)

This approach does have its limits. To start, Berg’s work will never receive top critical honors. It’s too commercial, too simplistic in scope. He also has a recycled storyboard: establish likable family oriented leads, depict quaint banter between all parties involved and when chaos ensues, human spirit guides everyone’s actions. The Berg recipe is ideal for honoring real heroes for now, but it won’t be long before these stories start to mix together.

And for all Berg’s strengths – pacing, polished production, emotional scoring – he doesn’t present a complex picture of what actually transpired. One scene in particular highlights how this film could’ve gone in a very different direction. As the catastrophe begins, Jimmy, or Mr. Jimmy, receives an award for safety, a tribute to Deepwater Horizon’s spotless record.

But rather than accentuate the juxtaposition between celebrating achievement and impending disaster, the entire sequence focuses on BP’s role, how one man pressured rig workers to OK drilling. BP is the primary villain here, but major investigations since the disaster have noted that both BP and Transocean, the company that owned the rig, share much of the responsibility.

Considering this, what if those on the rig became over confident? If that’s the case, and Deepwater Horizon’s strong safety record supports this, a more challenging film might be the result. In place of a story with a simple villain – a snide representative of a largely faceless entity – we would not have a tale of “heroes,” as the promotional material references them all, but a more objective story about survival without obligation to either BP or those on the boat.

Despite thin storytelling that seems entirely geared toward heroicizing Wahlberg, “Deepwater Horizon” remains an enjoyable and tear-jerking experience. Though the turnaround from reality to film is a rather perplexing piece of the larger story at work here.