Rent The Burning Sea (2021)

Gripping - The Burning Sea review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Third film in the Norwegian disaster trilogy and its another cracker. Set among the oil fields that have made Norway one of the worlds richest nations we have Sofia (Thorp) who has designed this funky flexable underwater robot. She is assigned the task of exploring a collapsed rig for survivors and during the mission it appears that the small land slip that caused the rig to sink is part of a much bigger issue. A decision is made to shut the whole field down and evacuate and this involves her boyfriend Stein (Belljand) having to manually close a stuck valve but as always things go south and he is trapped. Sofia uses her robot to find him and sets off on a rescue mission. Meanwhile a cascade of events has resulted in a the largest oil spill in history and to save the coastline of several counties a decison is taken to set fire to and burn off the oil before it makes landfall - needless to say one of the rigs in the coming conflagation is the very rig in which our heroes are currently stuck. It uses all the disaster movie tropes - takes its time to build so the audience can identity with the characters and puts them in a series of endless jeopordies but it grips throughout. Like the previous films it cost a fraction of what Hollywood would throw at it and as all the better for it - 4/5