It’s 5 o’clock on a beautiful spring morning. Your bedroom is bathed in a warm pool of sunshine and your partner is giving you stay-in-bed eyes. After making whoopee, your angelic daughter pops her head round the door – “I only did not knock because I want a brother” – before launching into a rehearsal of her What My Dad Does For A Living speech, which she is due to perform in school later that day. Coffee, tick. Peck on the cheek, tick. I love you, tickle tick. Then it’s hi ho, hi ho. 24 hours later you are engulfed in a ball of flames, gigantic steel cranes are crashing to the ground and in order to save your life you have to jump 100 feet into the unforgiving sea below. Oh, and it’s dark. 10 pm dark. And the surface water is riddled with debris and flames. If there is a God, he job-shares with Satan.
Such was the reality faced by Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), Chief Electronics Technician aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on the 20th April 2010 resulting in the loss of 11 lives and the largest oil spill in US history. Root cause? The list is long and litigious, but what comes through loud and clear in the film by director Peter Berg and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand is cost-cutting by BP which Williams’ character likens to trying to land a plane as it runs out of gasoline.
40 days behind schedule to get the so-called “well from hell” into production and with an operating cost of around $1.5 million per day, essential maintenance tasks were kicked into the long grass and most critically of all a test to assess the solidity of the cement seal on the well was cancelled at short notice. Why? To save money ($200,000) and, according to Berg in a recent radio interview, “it’s many people’s belief that they didn’t do the test because they just didn’t want to get any bad news. They knew if the test came up bad, they’re going have to rip it all out and do it again.”
Ironically, on the day of the disaster, a number of senior executives were on board patting themselves on the back and giving one another high-fives to celebrate seven consecutive years without a lost-time accident. One of whom was Donald Vidrine played with terrific corporate sliminess by John Malkovich whose onscreen duals with the weather-beaten Kurt Russell’s OIM “Mister Jimmy” Harrell fizz with mutual resentment and are worth the entrance money alone. Wahlberg does a fine job as the brave everyman Mike Williams who rescues several colleagues from the burning rig including Andreas Fleytus (Gina Rodriguez). And Kate Hudson as Mike’s wife Felicia represents the family and friends of the 126 crew members who anxiously followed developments on CNN.
But the real stars of the film are the rig which is an 85% recreation of the actual Deepwater Horizon rig and the special effects which bring all the horror and chaos to the big screen with frightening accuracy. It’s just a pity that it’s based on real life rather than fictional events in which 11 men lost their lives, 17 others were badly injured and more than 200 million gallons of crude oil was pumped into the Gulf of Mexico over a three-month period. No one has been held to account.
Video: Lionsgate Movies
[imdb id=tt1860357]
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