Who else loved the Deepwater Horizon movie? Supposedly the filmmakers built an 85-percent scale model of the drilling rig and put it into a water tank. This helped push the budget to $156 million.
Personally I was happy to see the Bristow heliport and the Sikorsky S-92 helicopter. The aviation radio calls did not seem plausible and the bird strike 50 miles offshore was also odd. What would the bird have been doing out there anyway? Why couldn’t a bird see and hear a 56′-long helicopter? Then there was the fact that the pilots were prepared to take off again without shutting down and inspecting the bird damage.
The rest of the movie is apparently mostly accurate (TIME; Washington Post; History vs Hollywood), with the exception of it all being BP’s fault (funny how it works out that a movie made by Americans assigns 100 percent of the blame to a British company!).
Why was this amazing effort and achievement of moviemaking not rewarded at the box office? I appreciated being given the opportunity to experience life on the rig before and after the disaster. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes and audience members gave the movie a mid-80s rating. Why didn’t more people get off the couch and into the theater to learn about one of the worst examples of humans not being as clever as we thought we were?
Theories:
- Americans don’t care about any story unless there is a hero who saves the day.
- The movie was released shortly before a presidential election and Americans were preoccupied.
[Thinking back to the actual event, I remember that all of my friends without technical training said “If only there had been more government oversight the blowout wouldn’t have happened.” My friends with technical/scientific training said “What did you think the flip side of drilling the world’s deepest oil well would look like?”]
Related:
Every time I read or hear about that spill I recall listening to oil billionaire Boone Pickens being interviewed just after the disaster occurred and hearing him absent-mindedly tell the interviewer “in the long run, it’s not that bad,” only to catch himself and then launch into what a “tragedy” is was. It was clear that he thought being in salt water, the oil spill danger would eventually lose out to the salt. As for lives lost, it was also clear he just looked at that as the cost of doing business.
In the end, little changed other than a stupid moratorium and higher insurance rates on drillers. And everyone got to witness that Father Time and salt water takes care of oil spills in the ocean.