by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was actually a surprisingly
disappointing movie: Deepwater Horizon,
directed by Peter Berg from a story by Matthew Sand and a script by him and
Matthew Michael Carnahan based on a New York Times news article by David Rohde and Stephanie Saul in
turn based on the infamous blowout of the exploratory oil well Deepwater
Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico off the
Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010. The central characters of the film are
technician Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and his immediate supervisor on the
rig, Jimmy Harrell (a surprisingly grizzled Kurt Russell), along with a woman
driller named Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) and a couple of bad guys from the
companies sponsoring the drilling, British Petroleum and TransOcean (the
company that actually owned the drilling rig), Kaluza (Brad Leland) and Vidrine
(John Malkovich), who refuse to let Harrell and Williams do the tests on the
cement that’s supposed to be the last line of protection against a blowout
because they don’t want to spend either the money or the time on this last
precaution to make sure the well is safe. The movie I would have liked to see about the Deepwater
Horizon is about what happened after the well blew out, 11 people died and BP and
TransOcean spent the next 87 days trying to figure out how to put out the fire
that was consuming the rig and stop the release of billions of barrels of oil
from the failed well.
Instead the film they actually made focused on the
operation of the Deepwater Horizon
and the first day of the incident, and the main focus was the personal heroism
of Harrell and Williams in putting their own lives at risk to evacuate the Deepwater
Horizon safely before any more people died.
Deepwater Horizon (the movie)
contains some awesomely beautiful shots of the actual undersea drilling (the
rig was designed to be “semi-submersible” and was essentially a barge — it was
built in South Korea and moved across the Pacific to Freeport, Texas and
thereafter into the Gulf of Mexico for use — and it was designed to drill 3 ½
miles under the ocean’s surface, the deepest oil well ever dug) and the fire
that consumed the rig, but they’re stuck in to the middle of some of the
sorriest scenes of human activity ever filmed. Aside from the principals, the
people in the movie blur into an indistinguishable mass of macho guys, all talking at once in the most
incomprehensible sound mix ever released on a major film since the first
version of Heaven’s Gate and
spouting so much oil-drillers’ jargon the film needs a lot of explanatory
titles just to give the non-oil driller audience some clue about what’s supposed to be going on and what in
fact is going wrong with what’s
going on. This film’s script is more elaborately “planted” than just about
anything made since the 1940’s, and while I generally like the way writers in
the classic Hollywood era set up clues for how the plot was going to turn, this
movie overdid it — especially in the early scene in which Mike Williams and his
wife (Kate Hudson) watch as their daughter prepares a school project about “My
Dad’s Job,” and to illustrate it she upends a Coca-Cola can, stabs it open with
a small pipe, then pours honey down the pipe (the honey represents the
“drilling mud” poured down an oil well to put pressure on the oil and get it to
come out) and seals it with a pencil to show how a well is capped — only the
combined pressure of the soda and the honey in the Coke can causes a burst that
prefigures the real-life well blowout to come.
Deepwater Horizon is apparently the second of at least three movies in
which Peter Berg has directed Mark Wahlberg in stories of survival based on
real life — the first was Lone Survivor (2013), about a raid in Afghanistan against a Taliban leader, and the
most recent is Patriots’ Day
(2017), a story about the real-life bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013 —
and though there are stray bits of anti-corporate commentary in Deepwater
Horizon (which reminded Charles of the 1943
German film Titanic, which pitted
a lone German-born ship’s officer against the captain and the head of the White
Star Line, on whose pursuit of a world’s record Atlantic crossing the disaster
is blamed), for the most part it’s just another war movie, albeit one in which
the good guys are coming under fire from a force of nature they’ve
inadvertently unleashed rather than a human enemy. Deepwater Horizon comes at a curious juncture in the Zeitgeist — there are a lot of ironies in this, of all films, being the last one Charles and I
watched together in the pre-Trump era — given that like the rest of the Republican
Party, Donald Trump seems not only opposed to but actually revolted by the
whole concept of renewable energy. If there’s one thing Deepwater
Horizon does right, it’s how well it
dramatizes the whole association between oil drilling and the macho concepts of manliness and virtue, a concept that’s
at the heart of the American Right’s idea of energy policy. Real men, the mentality holds, get their energy by doing
vivid, intense, life-threatening things like drilling for oil or digging for
coals; it’s only feminized wimps that hang solar panels or put up windmills —
and given how determined the Trump administration is to focus America’s energy
future almost exclusively on fossil fuels, it’s likely its policies will (to
paraphrase Che Guevara’s famous line) create two, three, a thousand Deepwater
Horizon incidents.
