Blowout to tremendous visual effect. A tragic story

Rating: 7/10 (30 June 2018)

An American action drama; Deepwater Horizon was the largest oil rig in the world and had been digging the deepest well in history beneath the Gulf of Mexico. The crew had been shutting down the exploratory Macondo Well, which potentially had a high yield of oil, when disaster struck.
Patrick Morgan, who was an assistant driller on the Deepwater Horizon rig, said of the movie before it was released: "I just don't want to see politics and political correctness and all that crap play into it." The film focused on the tragedy of the explosion and honouring the 11 men who lost their lives.
Despite some cumbersome schmaltz early on, the film settles on the story, precisely documenting the stages of the disaster. These scenes are accompanied by a fast dialogue that feels authentic with tossed around shorthand and lingo. Tension rises with clever editing as each step of mechanical failure is shown. The film achieves works very well on a special effects level, but as with many real-life films there are some inconsistencies in the factual telling which are worth noting.
The explosion came about due to years of cutting corners and not one careless mistake. The villain of the piece, BP Executive Donald Vidrine, played by John Malkovich in a gumbo-thick Louisiana drawl, in reality was not to blame. Vidrine spoke by phone to a BP engineer in Houston with regard to the problematic 'negative test' which proved fatal for the oil rig workers. Government investigations concluded that it was his BP superiors in Houston who were largely giving the orders for the crew to get work completed quicker on the well, which was 43 days behind schedule. BP's company man Vidrine certainly didn't expect that his decisions on the fateful day would lead to an inferno. The filmmakers could have found a better explanation for why intelligent people sometimes make such terrible decisions. Alas, this was an action movie with a story than needed someone to blame. In spite of this, several oversights and missteps were made by BP, and Halliburton - the American multinational corporation, and the Swiss company Transocean.
U.S. federal regulators who supervised drilling in the Gulf of Mexico signed off on Transoecean's plans at every stage, but this would not feature in the film's story and neither would the fact that all oil rigs were not fit for purpose.
The blowout preventer, which failed to stem the flow of oil when the wellhead erupted (widely used throughout the industry) was likely to be declared not fit for purpose.
All in all, an engrossing film and an affecting drama on human folly and obsession.