Dramatization of the April 2010 disaster. Failure to properly audit.

Rating: Null/10 (16 January 2017)

My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from a Redbox rental. No extras, just the movie.
The Deepwater Horizon was a semi-submersible rig for drilling oil and gas wells in very deep water, as deep as 8,000 feet, and designed to drill as deep as 30,000 feet, more than 5 miles deep. Its above-water platform was roughly the size to two football fields placed side-by- side.
I live near the Gulf Coast, my career was in the oil industry, so this event almost 7 years ago is still somewhat fresh in my mind. In April 2010 in final operations to seal off a new well and begin production, some shortcuts were taken. The sealing cement was not properly tested and when the incident happened high-pressure natural gas, methane, flooded the platform and resulted in a fireball, eventually destroying and sinking the platform. The largest oil spill in history resulted. Today it rests on the bottom of the Gulf about 5000 feet down. There had been 126 aboard and 11 died, the rest escaped via lifeboats.
I found the first half of this movie most interesting as it deals with the characters, their lives, how they traveled back and forth, how they interacted on the job, the depiction of the disagreements on well readiness. Most of the second half is the disaster and as such it becomes the somewhat typical disaster movie, showing the explosions, the falling rigs, the injuries, the escapes. All well made but nothing that we haven't seen before except we know this was a real event.
Mark Wahlberg is the co-main character, Mike Williams, chief instrument guy, and Kurt Russell as Jimmy Harrell, almost always called "Mr Jimmy", who it seemed was the chief supervisor on the rig. Both of them are excellent, I particularly liked Russell.