The humble disaster movie is a long-lived Hollywood tradition. Due to the advent of modern filming techniques, CGI, and virtual production environments, the only thing that stops these mammoth cinematic juggernaut experiences is the cost of making them, and finding a new form of natural hellish crucible to put the heroes through. In current cinema, these films either tend toward the garishly excessive fictional world-ending spectacles, or the more constrained and human tales, based on true stories of survival and heroism. The Lost Bus,  Apple TV’s latest addition to the disaster movie genre, is of that latter group; detailing the events of the 2018 Camp Fire, which ravaged the town of Paradise, and surrounding areas in Northern California.

The film is told largely from the perspective of Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a struggling and occasionally unreliable school bus driver who, by dint of circumstance, is at the wheel of the only bus close enough to pick up a class-full of young children and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrara), and rescue them from the land-sweeping, all-consuming inferno. But it’s more than a simple case of some smart driving while fireballs and sparking trees collapse around them, as the film takes time to show the emergency services under the supervision of Cal Fire Division Chief Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez) and Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jen Kissoon (Kate Wharton). As well as that, we also get a peek into McKay’s life, showing his difficult relationship with his family, and with his long suffering boss, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson) struggling to coordinate lost buses and frantic parents throughout the disaster.

Paul Greengrass, a director better known for his more recent work on the latter Bourne franchise films, turns to his more serious side, testing out the muscles that served him well on  his work helming other real-life stories such as Bloody Sunday, United 93 and Captain Phillips. This is a film that leans hard into both telling the human stories as well as acting as a wide enough canvas to let the audience follow the gist of the wider events, as the raging fires devour town and forest alike. In many ways, this feels more of a piece with Peter Berg’s 2016 film, Deepwater Horizon. Both films are a showcase of basic common decency of gruff hard working blue-collar folks, pitting themselves against an unstoppable force, while a slimy suit hangs in the background as an almost afterthought villain figure.

McConaughey holds the film together with a practiced ease, never seeming more than a few minutes from panic, and a wiry hunger to him that screams volumes about McKay’s barely-held-together life and mindset. The only issue coming in that in his scenes inside the bus, he’s mainly blunt, brusque but efficient, in ways that don’t allow for quite enough interplay between him and the kids, or Ferrera’s equally capable teacher. Instead the moments where he shines are in the personal moments, with frequently cut off calls between McKay and his wife Linda (Kimberli Flores) and in his interactions with his son, Shaun. In a turn of interesting casting, Shaun is played by McConaughey’s real life son Levi McConaughey, who auditioned under a pseudonym, as well as the small role of Shaun’s grandmother being played by real-life McConaughey matriarch, Kay. Luckily, this little corner of nepotism doesn’t detract from the movie.

If there is a flaw in the piece it’s that too often the fake CGI fires and the sweeping camera zooming through a special effect landscape feel too unreal, despite the quality of the effects work. Similarly there’s something not quite tangible about some of the scenes inside the bus, as it chugs through the fires and Ferrera and McConaughey gasp and flail about inside. That’s not to denigrate the moments of real stunt work, with both real fire and moving vehicles, but towards the end, as the bus lopes through smoke-black skies and skeletal forests, it’s almost impossible to accept what is onscreen as even vaguely real.

Even still, this is an occasionally knuckle-whitening story of human heart surviving the grimmest of situations, and is also a fair and timely warning about climate change and the undeniable effects it is having across the world.

Available on Apple TV now.