Deepwater
Horizon balances its
technical proficiency and explosive power with a genuine concern for the
dignity of the real people who survived, and those who did not survive, this terrible and avoidable tragedy.
In
April 2010 the semi-submersible exploratory drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, rented by BP and operating 40 miles off the
Louisiana coast, caught fire. There were 126 people onboard.
During the next few hours Eleven
people died. Many were seriously
injured. In the weeks – months- that
followed millions of gallons of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, a
major ecological and community disaster.
Years of litigation followed, with BP eventually paying out over $13
billion to individuals, businesses and the State. In November 2012 BP pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter, two
misdemeanors, and a felony count of lying to Congress. In 2014 U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled BP was guilty of gross negligence and willful
misconduct and had acted with “conscious
disregard of known risks.” His ruling stated that BP "employees took risks that led to the largest
environmental disaster in U.S. history,” that the company was “reckless,” and determined that several
crucial BP decisions were “primarily
driven by a desire to save time and money, rather than ensuring that the well
was secure.”
Many of the compensation agreement made by
BP included gagging clauses and so the
script for this movie had to be largely put together by Matthew Carnham and
Matthew Sand from the public record of
legal hearings and a major New York Times
article written by David Rohle and Stephanie Saul, with every word run past battalions
of lawyers paid by the film’s producers and by BP. The
producers also ran into difficulty finding anyone to provide the essential
transport services they needed to film out at sea, or to lend them a rig to
film on. In the end they had to build
their own rig.
If the film is not clear about the actual
causes of the disaster it is because nobody really knows. Something went badly wrong, allowing an
explosive ‘gusher’ of oil and methane gas to rise up the Marine Riser from the sea bed to the floating rig five
kilometres above and then ignite when these hydrocarbons were sucked into the
diesel generators onboard, causing a series of devastating explosions. The rig sank the next day but the gusher
burned for 87 days.
It is clear however that undue pressure
was put on the sub-contracted engineers by the BP Executives on the rig - Donald
Vidrine and Robert Kaluza - to complete the drill even though the results of
essential safety drills were ambiguous.
The work was behind schedule, and
delay costs money. Even before the
explosion it was being called the Well
from Hell.
It is not surprising therefor that the film only does what it
can do. This it does brilliantly,
concentrating on the personal disaster and the responses of the men – and one
woman – on board rather than examine the complex legal arguments. When Mark Walhberg came on board
(literally) as star and co-producer he took the part of Mike Williams, the Chief
Electrical Technician Engineer on the rig.
Kate Hudson plays William’s wife, Felicia, waking him on the morning he
is due to leave for his weeks long shift on the rig. There is a scene where their young daughter shares what she is going to
tell her class about ‘what my Daddy does’,
which she says is ‘stopping the dinosaurs
below the sea bed from escaping.’ This is a simple and effective metaphor
for the dangerous operation conducted by the Deepwater Horizon.
From the start we know that we are heading towards a major
disaster. We may not know how it will happen, but the build
up of tension is palpable, aided by Steve Jablonsky’s superb sound design. He has scored many horror movies, and this is
a different kind of horror movie. The
cinematographer, Enrique Chedick shot 28
Days Later, and 127 Hours, so he knows about building tension and
shooting in cramped circumstances. We see many shots of the drill column reaching from the rig to the concrete cap five
kilometers below, the cap meant to hold
back the enormous pressure of the ‘dinosaurs’ pushing from below. The
column shudders, bolts pop, the concrete heaves and the pressure dials on the
rig rise into the red zone. On the rig
another pressure battle is taking place between the engineers and the
execs. No one wants to make the
decision to stop the drill, at a cost of millions of dollars. And the readouts are ambiguous. The one man
on board who has the authority to hit the red button and stop the drill happens
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The courts, however, decided that the pressure exerted by the
company was criminal. Do you notice how
many times I have to use the word pressure’? This film is all about pressure, and how
systems and people respond to pressure.
I do wonder what film Paul Greengrass would have made. He oversaw the reconstruction of the actual conversations
on board Flight 93 as it flew towards
it’s destruction in Pennsylvania on 9/11, and those in the flight control
offices. Of course he also made Captain Phillips.
But Director Peter Ross has done good work here. There is not time enough to build the characters of the rig’s staff, even
of those who died, but he does show how ordinary men and women respond to extreme
circumstances, often with extreme courage, doing whatever they can to save the
live of others even at the risk of – or cost of
- their own. The ongoing explosions are well handled, and
even though we have Mike Williams as our central heroic figure the other main
players get their chances to shine. He
is joined by Kurt Russell as Jimmy Harrell, the Offshore Installation Manager
for TransOcean, the firm that owned the rig.
He exudes the kind of rugged reliability that a man in charge of such an
outfit needs to win the trust of the people in his care. John Malkovitch as BP’s Vidrine maybe enjoys
playing the villain too much. Gina Rodrigues is the woman who ‘steers’ the
rig, keeping it in place 5 kilometers
above the drill site. She has to be
rescued by Williams at the end, panicking at the prospect of jumping into the
burning sea, but is not otherwise a stereotyped screamer.
Wahlberg does what he does and does it well, and I was pleased
to see how that the film shows how after Mike Williams’ amazing composure and
courage as he battled to save lives on the rig he collapsed in total shock soon
after. PTSD seems to have kicked in, and may never have
left. When asked if the film accurately shows
the destructive power of the blow-out Williams himself has said that nothing ever could. He
has never set foot on a boat since that day.
As I was watching this movie I sometimes wondered about its
morality. Was it exploiting a recent
tragedy? Why wasn’t it clearly damning the
executive decisions, driven by the ruthless greed that is the companies highest
value?
But in the end I decided that it was doing all it could. It honours those who deserve honouring and
damns those who do not, even if that can only be at the local level. The BP execs who directly contributed to
the disaster were on the rig themselves.
Their decisions put them in danger too.
They could have been among the 11 that died. I
think there are questions about the way the crew put up with a history of poor
maintenance and equipment failure on the rig, but of course the real villains
live much higher up the food chain, so high that they are virtually unreachable,
unimpeachable. None of them went to prison even after BP
pleaded guilty to eleven manslaughter charges.
We can call this ‘structural
evil’ , when organizations themselves embody greed and do not care about
the cost to others, even when it costs lives.
It would be so nice to think that
this has nothing to do with ourselves, but it does. And we are all part of it. At the start of the film, as the men of the new shift fly out to the
rig, we glimpse something of the
enormous infrastructure the oil industry depends on even at such a local level. The oil industry spends trillions looking
for, refining and transporting oil. And
who pays for it all? Who wants it to
exist? We do.
