Documentary filmmaker Tylor Norwood embedded himself with California firefighters battling the million acre “Dixie Fire” of 2021 for “Fireline,” a new documentary about the dangerous work and ever-worsening fire situation in California and around the world in a warming, drying climate.

Norwood got access to the leaders in “Fire Incident” HQ for a top-down look at the “strategy,” “resource allocation” and other considerations political appointees face when battling a parade of calamitous wildfires every “fire season.”

“It’s a chessboard of resources and priorities,” with decision makers acting as generals, running the battle from behind the lines, says California Office of Emergency Services chief Mark Ghilarducci.”

And Norwood — the Robin Williams doc “Robin’s Wish” was his — got in the trucks and out on the lines with the young men and women rolling up to Janesville, Susanville and environs, trying to protect lives and property from “a 200 foot wall of flame” bearing down on them as they deployed.

Some 6,000 fire fighters were summoned to battle this blaze, “adrenalin junky” young folks who risk their necks in deadly, wearying work that is as intensely dangerous as any job in the world.

The firefighters talk about their fatigue, the homes they have to go back to, the “thousand hours of overtime” one says he collected that year because of the worsening fire climate.

Their work on the line is all about “doing the right thing in the right place at the right time for the right reasons,” one of their chiefs exhorts them.

The units speak in a mix of military lingo mixed with fire jargon all their own. The “battle” is a game of showing up, make sure people have evacuated, prepping the ground and “reading” the fire — its clouds, its shifts in direction and intensity.

And as they wait “for the fire to come to us,” they weight “risk vs. gain” scenarios, all the ways this coming fight could turn out. Their priorities? Protect lives, protect property and when it comes down to it, protect firefighters, because a house is “just a house,” and not worth anybody dying for.

The film is a little repetitive, and for all the “embedded” access Norwood was granted, striking shots of firefighters silhouetted against an orange inferno was the main payoff.

We don’t gain many insights about where to make your stand, how to prep a defensive line (cutting dead trees) or how to attack the blaze once it’s there, tracking your limited water as you drain the tanks on your truck hosing down this or that spot.

Neither the top-down nor bottom-up points of view give us a taste of the “strategy” everyone seen here — a few leaders at the top, three firefighters in the line — talks about so much.

Like many a documentary on such a subject, what we’re treated to is something lacking in drama and characters and suspense and a sense of the stakes. A victim is briefly chatted up here, a home is defended there, with a lot of tedious but necessary routine eating up time on the line awaiting the blaze.

“Fireline” is worthwhile mainly as the background research for a more coherent, tense and nuts and bolts (fictional) feature film that recreates much of what we see here in more easily grasped recreations and better organized storytelling.

Rating: unrated, profanity, graphic descriptions of burns

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tylor Norwood. A Quotable Pictures release.

Running time: 1:21