The film version focuses on the second fact, not on the first, and turns this story into a somewhat conventional disaster movie, complete with heroic working-class engineers (played by Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell), weaselly corporate higher ups (embodied principally by John Malkovich, relishing an extreme Texas accent), And as a big-budget disaster movie, it works effectively enough - the heroics are suitably heroic, the disaster suitably disastrous and the panic and tension in the moment grips effecively.
It's in the bigger picture where things don't work as well. Kate Hudson gets the usual part of the wife-at-home-who-wonders-what's-happened-to-her-man and does nothing more with this part than generations of actresses have done with the nothing role that it continues to be. There is a nice moment near the end where it appears pretty clear Wahlberg is going through PTSD, but it goes by so fast it can only be a gesture rather than something dwelling. And it's in the conflict between wanting rah-rah triumph and wanting to tell a somewhat more serious story about an actual event that had consequences that this doesn't quite satisfy. It isn't deep enough to really tell the serious story, but it keeps enough of the serious elements that it doesn't quite work as rah-rah triumph either.
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