Such a venerable genre, the disaster movie. It seemed they’d had their day. Big-budget films scored highly in the Seventies (The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno) and then again in the Nineties (Titanic). When CGI made global destruction economical there was a fair bit of that to enjoy too (Armageddon, Deep Impact).

However, the events of September 11, 2001, induced a degree of tactfulness in Hollywood studios, a development few had ever expected to live to see — although there was of course still Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow). While images of the Twin Towers still live in the mind the classic disaster movie — dreadful mayhem overwhelming some hubristic human construction, with a few favoured leads making it out of there against all the odds — has seemed pretty superfluous.

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Deepwater Horizon, however, revives the genre and does so by a rugged honesty to the facts of a specific catastrophe that actually happened and which cannot be associated with 9/11.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon floating drilling rig, operated by Swiss company Transocean but working for BP, exploded after an uncontrolled blowout, eventually sinking 5,000 feet to the bottom of the sea some 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana.

Of the 126 people on board that day, 11 died and 17 were injured. The subsequent oil spill, which lasted for 87 days and spewed millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico, was the worst ever environmental disaster in the US — and the cost to BP, determined by a court to be most at fault, has been some $54 billion.

This horrific event was turned into a punchy multi-authored article, Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours, in The New York Times later that year (still freely accessible online), strong on human interest rather than the complex technological issues.

The film’s writer, Matthew Sand, has stuck closely to that structure — for the actual technical faults (cementing mistakes, blowout preventer failure, among others) are not so easily grasped.

Peter Berg (who made the potty sci-fi board game Battleship with Rihanna but then also Lone Survivor, about Navy SEALs in Afghanistan with Mark Wahlberg) has directed ambitiously, making the movie, he says, as “deeply experiental” as possible: “I don’t want my films to be a spectator sport.”

So comparatively little CGI was used. Instead, a colossal set was constructed in Louisiana. And the action all takes place in a single day.

Wahlberg, solidly likeable as ever, plays the down-to-earth hero, repair technician Mike Williams, who stayed on the rig until the end of the catastrophe. He gives this film its heart. “What Mark brings is honesty and a real sense of blue-collar intensity,” rejoices producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Or, to put it another way, Wahlberg has never been able to act much, or appear very differently from how he actually is, which is precisely what makes him such a treat.

We see Mike leaving his adorable wife Felicia (Kate Hudson) and cute daughter, to be helicoptered out for a three-week stint on the rig. At breakfast that day his little girl reads out a school essay she has written about her dad’s job: “That oil is a monster, like the mean old dinosaurs it used to be.” Aww!

Mike works for a tough but highly respected Transocean manager, Mr Jimmy (Kurt Russell with plenty of prosthetics), alongside a rather fetching colleague played by Gina Rodriguez, whose job it is to keep the rig floating in position. It is curious to hear how structured and formal their speech becomes when they’re working, being naval crew in their way — although fidelity to Southern accents, plus the use of a lot of technical vocab in a noisy environment, makes some of the dialogue hard to pick up. Like Glaswegian, almost.

Riding them hard on this trip are some BP execs, angered that the drill is behind schedule and over-budget. Two of them are just chumps, foolishly presenting a safety award, but their boss, Donald Vidrine, is none other than John Malkovich at his nastiest, insisting that corners are cut, essential tests skimped or misinterpreted. When he asks Mike exactly what the problems are with the inadequately maintained rig, Wahlberg recites a fantastic list at top speed. But, despite Mike saying “hope ain’t a tactic”, BP pushes on regardless. “Money, money, money,” sing the crew, sarcastically.

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The first half of the film struggles to clarify exactly what is going wrong, despite ominous underwater footage and subtitles telling us what we’re seeing in the murk. But the nightmarish explosions of pressure and the raging balls of heat that fill the second half are dynamically filmed, the camera itself reeling and trapped — and if the structure that the crew are trying to escape remains a little confusing, as huge girders and platforms crash in flames and projectiles burst around them, with the sea itself catching fire, that only heightens the sense of terror, the apparent impossibility of escape.

The climax is moving and it’s never a problem to root for Wahlberg — while, conversely, few disaster movies point the finger at a corporation as directly as this. Berg resourcefully suggests a deeper purpose to the film: that seeing inside such a giant and complex rig might somehow make us appreciate our fossil fuels more. “Even if we drive a hybrid, we use fossil fuels — yet we know very little about how we get our fuels.”

But there’s no moral. This is just old-fashioned disaster, perennial heroism. Brave men — and one woman. Another towering inferno.