“We were in the dark. It was quiet. Nothing. I only had enough time to tell my guys that we’re in trouble. ‘Something’s wrong, guys, and we’re in trouble.’ And then the first explosion hit us. It picked me up and flung me, it flipped me through the air like a rag doll. I couldn’t move. Alls I can hear was screaming, incoherent screamings of pain, screaming, ‘I’m dying, I’m hurt, somebody help me’.”

If you heard this quote out of context, you might assume it can be sourced back to a Vietnam vet or 9/11 responder. But you would be wrong, and more than that, you would be shocked; this is the testimony of Doug Brown, chief engineer on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and one of the survivors of the 2010 explosion that led to the now notorious BP oil spill. Every syllable Brown enunciates sets him on the verge of quivering. Each moment he spends reliving the memory cuts like a lash. It’s a somber moment, a grim moment, and a moment we should all feel privileged to have access to.

Brown is just one of the many subjects in documentarian Margaret Brown’s latest effort, The Great Invisible. As anybody can probably infer based on the above, the film focuses on the Horizon, the tragedy, the many and exponentially increasing elements that led to the disaster, and how people have lived their lives in its wake. “People” is a term applied with a broad brush; Brown interviews victims of the catastrophe as well as the good Samaritans trying to help desperate families recover from it, the corporate lawyers denying claims to the affected, and, on occasion, Houston fat cats whose inclusion here feels like a feeble attempt at maintaining fairness and balance.

In defense of Brown, she has little other choice. As we’re told during The Great Invisible’s opening moments, BP refused to participate in the making of the film, leaving her with resources enough to cobble together a doc with obvious bias. But even with full, even-handed representation, it’s sort of hard to imagine how anybody could sympathize with oil tycoons sucking down expensive drinks and more expensive cigars as they speak contempt over the suffering of others. They’re awful, and no amount of restraint would paint them differently. What’s a little post-traumatic stress for rig workers when there’s cash to be made?

But they’re also all we’ve got, here, and so Brown’s film ends up with a pretty obvious liberal slant. That’s fine, of course, because what happened on the Deepwater Horizon, and to its crew, and to the men and women who make their livings off of the ocean’s bounty, is nothing short of criminal. Politics don’t change that. A version of The Great Invisible with a more robust point of view would still make that exact same case, whether it meant to or not. When Brown takes the film to Bayou La Batre and visits local volunteer Roosevelt Harris, she shows us the accident’s terrible impact on Alabama residents up close. It’s a horrific sight, seeing deprived folks living in trailers with signs reading “Nothing left to steal” nailed to them, and we observe it all in unflinching detail.

These bits are the best The Great Invisible has to offer. In fact, they’re so good, and Harris is such a magnetic sage, that it’s a shame Brown didn’t think to just center the picture foremost on the bayou. Here, the title rings most true. This is where news coverage cut out, and where our understanding of its reach ended. Nothing about Deepwater Horizon went untouched in the media firestorm chronicling the escalating brouhaha 4 years ago, except for the lives which were most impacted by corporate corner cutting and greed.Thoroughly, smartly researched and indelibly factual, The Great Invisible offers little by way of new analysis, but it does provide us with fresh, urgent, heartbreaking perspective into one of America’s most shameful national calamities.

Grade: B-