Murky waters, dogged investigation in Norway

In Pioneer the Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjaerg (of the original Insomnia, with Stellan Skarsgård) turns his attention to the Eighties North Sea oil drilling boom. As Petter, the protagonist, a bold and experienced diver, we get Aksel Hennie, who starred as the duped art thief in the outrageously high-speed 2012 Headhunters. There's a remake of that coming, and one of Pioneer is on the way too, the latter produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov. Petter, who sports Seventies sideburns, is a troubled and angry man who embarks on his own investigation when Norwegian and US authorities refuse to take responsibility or investigate his brother's death by his side in an early dive. Pioneer is rich in gritty and authentic technical details of sailing and diving as well as sporting a nostalgic closeness to Seventies thrillers. But it has drawbacks from the start, notably a score that tends to be overbearing and a script that never quite catches fire. As Xian Brooks of the Guardian wrote Pioneer suffers from "plot overload." In other words, so much is happening that none of it finally matters. Mean, glowering American characters played by a one-note ill-tempered Wes Bentley and a woodenly fake-affable, underneath-devious Stephen Lang do not help either. In fact they make the larger context feel faked even though the technical details of drilling and diving are very well done.

Early scenes show the divers submitting to a series of staged tests, starting with a compression chamber, to prepare them for the actual event of diving to the 500-meter depth where the drilling is going to take place. The first real dive nonetheless involves a catastrophic glitch that causes damage to the helmet and suit of Petter's brother Knut (Andre Eriksen), while they're working side by side. Petter can't save or revive his brother -- a sequence that's agonizing and real. Then comes the stonewalling.

Petter is a risk-taker, and he breaks all the rules in his one-man investigation. This is initially fun and suspenseful, and when the bosses who're onto what he's doing at one point tighten the screws using the compression chamber, it makes for an particularly tense sequence. Petter's investigation isn't empty. Mike (Bentley) seems bent on killing him. Through a (seeming) Norwegian ally at the company, Petter finds out about an experimental element in the gas fed the divers by the Americans that's meant to help them breathe, but caused problems.

The diffuseness of the plot is, in a way, intentional, because the point is that guilt spreads out in all directions. This is a portrait of both American and Norwegian greed in which the divers are the misused pawns. The Americans may be worse; historically they eventually were forced to pull out and allowed the Norwegians to exploit the oil and gas resources under the North Sea by themselves, making Norway (as end notes tell us) one of the world's wealthiest countries.

Skjoldbjaerg certainly knows how to do physical action. And Aksel Hennie knows his craft, never allowing Petter to seem a hysterical or exaggerated character. The camerawork by dp Jallo Faber, contributing significantly to the mood, includes many elegantly framed, yellow-tinged long- and middle-distance shots along with claustrophobic, vertiginous closeups. But the suspense doesn't quite gather the momentum it needs, due to the lack of a single villain.

Pioneer, 111 mins., debuted at Toronto September 2013, showing at various fests thereafter including San Francisco May 2014. It opened theatrically in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, and other countries and enters US cinemas via Magnolia PIctures 5 December 2014. At Landmark Opera Plaza San Francisco 19 Dec.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.