Deepwater Horizon Review

When making a movie about a disaster of mass proportion the last thing you want is subtly, Peter Berg, the great director of the award winning action thriller Lone Survivor, was the perfect choice for constructing a movie that accurately depicts the horrible events that occurred six years ago.

On April 20th 2010, while drilling off the Gulf Of Mexico, an uncontrollable blowout caused an explosion on an Oil Rig called Deepwater Horizon that killed 11 crewmen and ignited a fireball visible from 40 miles.

Chief technician Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and his fellow oil drillers find themselves fighting for survival as the heat and the flames become overwhelming. Banding together, the co-workers had to use their strength and knowledge to survive and make it off the oil rig back to their families.

Deepwater Horizon gives a charismatic point of view that finally allows the public insight and perspective beyond what the media showed following the disaster six years ago. We now are able to view the horrible events that took place that night giving us a greater sense of heroism and empathy for those workers and what they endured.

Deepwater Horizon was owned by Transocean ( a huge oil drilling contracting company) but was being rented by BP. The catastrophe was caused by lack of safety and security checks due to greediness by BP officials who were too busy money chasing. Knowing their was a huge pressure problem, they continued to drill which caused a fracture of the core, the natural gas traveled up the Deepwater rig’s riser to the platform, where it ignited, killing 11 workers and injuring 17. The rig capsized and sank on the morning of April 22.

Thirty days after the explosion, the winds and currents carried Deepwater Horizon’s oil from the open sea to the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Florida, covering over 1,000 miles of shoreline.The area of the oil spill affected 8,000 species, including fish, birds, sea turtles and marine mammals.

This extraordinary film should come with a warning. The warning should be about the terror that will come about you as you become a witness to the horrors of the first mud explosion, then oil, then gas and uncontrollable fire. The pyrotechnics will consume you and you will want to duck and hide to avoid collapsing steel and projectiles of every sort.

You may know Mark Wahlberg from the Extraordinary film Lone Survivor where he plays a Navy Seal (Marcus Luttrell) as he and his comrades fight of the taliban and go through hellish disasters as they try and get back home to their families. His role in Deepwater Horizon is similar in the way that both characters are fighting through crazy circumstances in order to survive and get back home.

Another key actor in the film is Dylan O’Brien,  a young actor who played in recent thriller The Maze Runner. O’Brien’s role in Deepwater Horizon is unique because he has to play the role of a 25-year-old Oil Rig worker who has to step up and be a man amongst men and try and save the rest of his crew along with Mark Wahlberg.

The film is a great representation of the actual events that occurred on that horrible night. I’d highly recommend seeing the film as it will be bring empathy and respect for all those who were involved in the actual events.