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Deepwater Horizon

289 statements
56 feature instances
6 referencing feature instances

Deepwater Horizon	type	TVTItem
Deepwater Horizon	label	Deepwater Horizon
Deepwater Horizon	page	DeepwaterHorizon
Deepwater Horizon	comment	Deepwater Horizon is a 2016 dramatization of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, and Kate Hudson star alongside relative newcomers Dylan O'Brien and Gina Rodriguez in a production that depicts the start of the worst oil spill disaster in U.S. history. Many of the characters are direct representations of real people, including protagonist Mike Williams (played by Wahlberg).In April 2010, a group of Transocean crew are transported to the semi-submersible drilling rig Deepwater Horizon for the final stages of drilling the well they've been working on. Also along are some supervisors from BP, the company they're drilling for, who want to know why they have gotten so far behind schedule. Despite the myriad of problems the rig is experiencing, the BP reps insist on expediting the process regardless of the concerning warnings. When a test of the well that was insisted on results in a dangerous blowout, a series of events cascades out of control, threatening the entire rig and the lives of everyone on board.
Deepwater Horizon	fetched	2024-02-13T16:00:19Z
Deepwater Horizon	parsed	2024-02-13T16:00:19Z
Deepwater Horizon	processingComment	Dropped link to HistoricalDomainCharacter: Not a Feature - IGNORE
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Deepwater Horizon / int_127fc252	type	Creator Cameo
Deepwater Horizon / int_127fc252	comment	Creator Cameo: Director Peter Berg plays Mr. Skip, the person Jimmy speaks to just after getting off the helicopter.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_1439161f	type	Heroic BSoD
Deepwater Horizon / int_1439161f	comment	Heroic BSoD: When he truly has a moment to collect himself, the sheer horror of what had just happened crushes poor Mike, understandably enough. Andrea has one when she and Mike are about to jump off the rig. No one can blame her, as all the life boats are gone, and her only way off the rig is to jump several feet into an ocean that's on fire.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_15b2cab3	type	Tempting Fate
Deepwater Horizon / int_15b2cab3	comment	Tempting Fate: All over the film before the blowout, despite wanting to make sure everything is in order before the well is flowed, with the Horizon almost two months behind schedule on completing the Macando well and moving on to other projects, Vidrine wants the well flowed ASAP, despite all the warning signs. How many warning signs? Let's see: The crew in charge of the cement bond log are sent home before logging the condition of the cement in the well, which is not secure in sealing the well properly, leading to the catastrophic failure of the cement and the blowout. Vidrine agrees to the negative pressure test to ensure the well is properly sealed, but when the reading comes back well in the danger zone of over 1000 PSI in the main bore, Vidrine diverts it to the "bladder effect" and agrees to a second test on the kill line, only for the kill line to become clogged and give off a false reading of 0 PSI. Despite the truth of the matter that with both readings not equal in their results, Vidrine mistakenly believes the main bore reading is false, not the kill line, and orders the well flowed. Very big mistake. The annular valves manage to temporarily stop the flow of oil, methane, and mud coming up the well bore, but they can only take so much strain in holding back that much pressure before completely failing since their design was not made with a potential blowout in mind. Andrea sees her monitor showing the dreaded magenta gas alarms all up the derrick and realizes the worst-case scenario of an impending blowout. She tries to send out a mayday call over the international emergency frequency of channel 16 on the radio, but is stopped by her superior, Captain Kuchta, who tells her off thinking she's overreacting, until she points at the camera feed from the well being obscured and Kuchta takes notice, immediately going out to check himself while Andrea tries again to signal the USCG. Then the engines jam, a spark ignites the methane and oil, and all hell breaks loose, forcing Kuchta to have to send out his own mayday call after realizing he was a fool for not trusting Andrea's earlier fears because he held rank over her. Only made worse by the one BP member on the bridge that witnessed the ignition telling off Kuchta as to if he can't see the huge inferno now engulfing the Horizon. The Emergency Disconnect System, or EDS, was improperly designed for cutting the well bore and sealing it from further catastrophic flow of the oil from the Macando Prospect. The blind-ram shears were not designed for cutting a well pipe that had been bent from stress of the oil platform moving off-center by a large degree, and jammed before being completely snapped apart by the extreme pressure of the oil flowing up the well. If the entire Blowout Preventer had been properly built back in the factory before being applied to the well in its current state because of BP wanting the well flowed and the Horizon moved on to other projects before losing any more time and money on delays, Mr. Jimmy could have stopped the well and saved what was left of the Horizon.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_19df659c	type	Gone Horribly Wrong
Deepwater Horizon / int_19df659c	comment	Gone Horribly Wrong: The negative pressure test on the bleed pipe leads to a blockage that builds up pressure and causes the blowout and eventual fire.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_1a5bba2b	type	Artistic License â€“ Geology
Deepwater Horizon / int_1a5bba2b	comment	Artistic License â€“ Geology: The film has multiple foreboding clips of bubbles seeping out of the sea floor deep below the surface of the water. It makes for a chilling image, but analysis has reported that nothing like that happened. It's a pretty strong case of the Rule of Perception as it means audiences get more of a sense of the oil being a trapped monster ready to burst.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_1c2b6ac8	type	Soft Water
Deepwater Horizon / int_1c2b6ac8	comment	Soft Water: A special aversion takes place here. Mike and Andrea actually did survive jumping several stories off of the rig and into the Gulf. It should be mentioned that 'survive' isn't the same thing as 'immediately got to safety without injury', though. Offshore workers are, however, trained on how to jump off a rig into water in a way to minimize injury.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_22cf536c	type	Chekhov's Gun
Deepwater Horizon / int_22cf536c	comment	Andrea has spent a lot of time and effort getting her mustang to run but to no avail. Becomes a Chekhov's Gun when Mike tries to use it to talk Andrea out of her Heroic BSoD.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_2af6bbeb	type	Break the Haughty
Deepwater Horizon / int_2af6bbeb	comment	Break the Haughty: Before the blowout, Don Vidrine can't convert oxygen into carbon dioxide without making a smug remark to the Transocean crew. After getting caught at ground zero of the blowout, he spends the rest of the movie in a state of shock, covered head-to-toe in oil and mud. He barely rasps out two words for the rest of the movie and can't even look Mr. Jimmy in the eye.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_2b5ab7c1	type	Analogy Backfire
Deepwater Horizon / int_2b5ab7c1	comment	Analogy Backfire: BP supervisor Don Vidrine calls the drilling crew "nervous as cats" when they protest against pulling out the drilling fluid that could be (and was) the only thing holding the well back. One of the drillers (Stephen Ray Curtis) later retorts that cats aren't nervous, and that he had a cat who mounted his Labrador.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_37d94ed9	type	Agony of the Feet
Deepwater Horizon / int_37d94ed9	comment	Agony of the Feet: Rig manager Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) has to pull out of his bare foot a long shard of glass, which pierced it when the explosion threw him around like a ragdoll. Later on, Jimmy and collegue Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) work with others to free a fellow worker stuck in the floor with an exposed leg fracture, and they do so by snapping the bone back in the leg barehanded to make it fit in the floor crack. Both moments are as squicky as they sound.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_3bc88a7f	type	Foregone Conclusion
Deepwater Horizon / int_3bc88a7f	comment	Dale also tries to bet Mike that they'll back at the same spot. Mike doesn't take him up on it. We know that they wouldn't.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_3e8d9cd3	type	Historical Hero Upgrade
Deepwater Horizon / int_3e8d9cd3	comment	Historical Hero Upgrade: While the real Mike Williams did in fact jump the equivalent of 10 stories to escape the burning Deepwater Horizon, many of the other heroic actions performed by Wahlberg's Williams in the film - including rescuing Mr. Jimmy, crossing the burning rig to turn the power back on, and pulling Andrea Flyte along with him as he jumped - were exaggerated or made up entirely for the film.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_42c186e	type	A Tragedy of Impulsiveness
Deepwater Horizon / int_42c186e	comment	A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: As the film begins, the Horizon is 43 days behind schedule on the well they've been drilling. BP is riding them to get it finished and ordering measures taken to try and make up lost time, measures that have the Transocean people scratching their heads. When Mike asks a few roughnecks if it's stupid what they're doing, they say they're not sure it's stupid, but it "ain't smart". Eventually all this leads up to an uncontrolled pressure buildup that causes a blowout and eventual explosion. Since the general story is known to the audience going in, so much of this screams of Tempting Fate.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_43b154c9	type	Not Even Bothering with the Accent
Deepwater Horizon / int_43b154c9	comment	Not Even Bothering with the Accent: As in his previous Berg-helmed outing, Wahlberg half-heartedly attempts his real-life subject's southern accent for about one scene before dropping into the familiar Boston accent audiences know. Ultimately this works well enough since his attempted southern twang is much more distracting than his expected Boston accent. The fact that both accents are "working-class everyman" kinds of dialects fitting the character helps.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_53224e46	type	Bookends
Deepwater Horizon / int_53224e46	comment	Bookends: The opening lines of the film are Mike being sworn in to testify before the investigation board as to the happenings aboard the rig. The film ends with clips of various testimonies before the board.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_53fd0a77	type	Out of the Frying Pan
Deepwater Horizon / int_53fd0a77	comment	Out of the Frying Pan: When the well blows, foreman Jason Anderson tries to get two of the roughnecks (Shane Roshcho and Adam Weise) to safety by sending them to mud pits. Unfortunately, things are even worse in the mud pits, as pipes were bursting with mud, and the out-of-control pressure was tearing the room apart. It was ultimately consumed in a series of explosions claiming the lives of everyone down there. Including the two roughnecks who were taking refuge.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_557838d1	type	Adaptational Attractiveness
Deepwater Horizon / int_557838d1	comment	Adaptational Attractiveness: To be expected, given that the normal, real-life characters are played by model-like Hollywood A-listers Kate Hudson and Mark Wahlberg.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_56515a39	type	Artistic License â€“ History
Deepwater Horizon / int_56515a39	comment	This is somewhat of an Artistic License â€“ History situation. Both Vidrine and his lesser shown college Robert Kaluza, while portrayed as uncaring villains in the film, were only partly responsible for the disaster as people. They were representatives of a flawed corporate culture that didn't act independently or otherwise get out of line with the company's overall attitude.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_5a40d6a	type	Adaptation Distillation
Deepwater Horizon / int_5a40d6a	comment	Right after escaping the burning rig, the survivors didn't gather together on their rescue boat for a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Something very similar happened the morning after the disaster, though, after assistant driller named Patrick Morgan spoke out an "Our Father" and many others joined in to pay respects to the dead. Counts as a chronological case of Adaptation Distillation.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_5ff56a1f	type	Long List
Deepwater Horizon / int_5ff56a1f	comment	Long List: Mike recites a list of "mission-critical equipment" not working, ending with the air conditioner.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_627264e0	type	Death Glare
Deepwater Horizon / int_627264e0	comment	Death Glare: When they see each other again after the explosion, Jimmy gives Don the coldest glare ever, made more intense through only one eye. Later, on the Damon Bankston, Jimmy gives another when he realizes Don was the only one in the drilling shack to make it out alive.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
Deepwater Horizon / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: Dale the crane operator tries to secure a crane that's about to knock the derrick on top of his friends. He succeeds but gets killed when flying debris blows him out of the operator's cab. The other workers react in horror.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_64e975cf	type	Manly Tears
Deepwater Horizon / int_64e975cf	comment	Manly Tears: After getting off the rig and back in a nice, safe hotel room, Mike collapses in a sobbing heap on the floor, where his wife and daughter eventually find him.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_69fb91e8	type	Chewing the Scenery
Deepwater Horizon / int_69fb91e8	comment	Chewing the Scenery: This is practically the trademark of John Malkovich's smarmy character Don Vidrine, especially when it comes to business matters. Both Mean Boss and Evil Is Hammy apply.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_6f44042b	type	The Immodest Orgasm
Deepwater Horizon / int_6f44042b	comment	The Immodest Orgasm: Implied by Sydney's comment to Mike and Felicia that she didn't interrupt them because she wants a baby brother.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_7870735b	type	From Bad to Worse
Deepwater Horizon / int_7870735b	comment	From Bad to Worse: The entire movie is built on this. First the negative pressure test has a pressure reading into the red, then the same test on the bleed pipe leads to a blockage in that pipe that gives a 0 psi reading in the control shack, but leads to a pressure buildup in the pipe, that then comes gushing up in a fountain that reaches to the top of the derrick. This causes fumes to get into the air intakes, leading to the engines to overclock to the point that they jam, and then explode, catching all that free oil on fire.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_79e07b47	type	Lecture as Exposition
Deepwater Horizon / int_79e07b47	comment	Lecture as Exposition: This happens... but not quite. The audience just see the practice for one. Sydney's, Mike's daughter, demonstrates Mike's job by shaking a can of soda up and then punching a metal pipe into it. This, followed by pouring honey down the pipe to keep the soda from coming out, is planned to show her classmates (and clearly demonstrates to the audience) the general principle of what drilling mud is and how it works.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_7f390ebc	type	Developing Doomed Characters
Deepwater Horizon / int_7f390ebc	comment	Developing Doomed Characters: although one could make a very solid argument that itâ€™s an aversion since the disaster doesnâ€™t even start until past the halfway point of the movie. The first half goes into a lot of detail about what life is like for an oil rig worker intermixed with a lot of tension about the impending disaster. Since the general public knows very little about how an oil rig works it could be seen as very interesting and since you never know when the fire was gonna start it was also very tense.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_87504252	type	The Big Board
Deepwater Horizon / int_87504252	comment	The Big Board: BP corporate figure Don Vidrine (John Malkovich) uses this to draw a large diagram illustrating his idea as to why the negative flow test (an important safety test run before the bigger work got started) had such a dangerous reading even though no mud (or oil, for that matter) came shooting back up into the rig. While the trope is played straight, the people in the room with him regard his theory with strong skepticism.note A notable inversion of what actually happened. The "bladder effect" idea about a false pressure reading actually came from the Transocean crew. Don felt uncertain enough about this to run things by his own superiors (off safely on land), who unwisely advised him to just drill. Both BP and Transocean personnel then came to an agreement, and, unfortunately...
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Deepwater Horizon / int_90e31482	type	Laser-Guided Karma
Deepwater Horizon / int_90e31482	comment	Laser-Guided Karma: Vidrine had a lot of direct responsibility for the blowout (in the film for sure, at least, while in real-life things were rather complicated) due to his insistence that the confusing readings from the negative pressure tests were the result of the "bladder effect," a theory he co-formulated with Kaluza that states the reading is the result of outside pressure covering the annular. When the drilling mud first bursts out through the pipe, Vidrine himself is on the drill floor to be covered in it. This is somewhat subverted in the end given that Vidrine did survive the disaster while several others (including those that were just a few feet away from him) died horribly. In Real Life, Virdine (yes, he's a real person and not a Composite Character meant to personify BP malfeasance) wound up beating the wrap for manslaughter while being convicted for another charge. It's worth noting again that even while Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza are real people, their portrayal in the film isn't quite true to life. For one, Vidrine wasn't the source of the "bladder effect" hypothesis. More generally, the business' constant pressure of "schedule over safety" was an institutional flaw in corporate philosophy, quite different than one or two men demanding success above all else. The manslaughter charges got dropped in large part since prosecutors believed Kaluza and Vidrine had gotten somewhat scapegoated for systemic corporate failures and poor processes. The quasi-composites serve as the audience's Hate Sink, understandable enough, in large part since they just happened to be the faces at ground zero. Neither Kaluza nor Vidrine were called to testify at the Coast Guard and other hearings following the disaster, but the testimony on record (available here) damns the general corporate attitudes that led to the disaster as a malformed philosophy throughout BP.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_947bf915	type	Last Day of Normalcy
Deepwater Horizon / int_947bf915	comment	Last Day of Normalcy: As the test is being carried out, we cut around to various individuals just going about their business, Mike on a video call with Felicia, the BP people in the conference room amusing themselves while they wait, a crewman on the Damon Bankston talking about how he's started doing yoga, all unaware of what the next few hours will bring.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_9b06e314	type	Greater-Scope Villain
Deepwater Horizon / int_9b06e314	comment	Greater-Scope Villain: The highest of the high-ups at BP, who from their offices safely on land keep pushing everybody below them to hurry up and get the drilling job done, count as this to a T. However, the officials depicted directly in the film, on the scene at the rig, get the worst characterization.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_9d12bbc1	type	Foreshadowing
Deepwater Horizon / int_9d12bbc1	comment	Foreshadowing: In the first scene, when the inspection rover heads back up, a single drop of oil seeps out of the ground by the well. When Mike's daughter, Sydney, has finished her kitchen table presentation (a partial case of Lecture as Exposition, as she's only preparing for the actual presentation), the honey ("mud") gives way and the soda ("oil") comes shooting up the pipe. When Mr. Jimmy meets a pair of BP execs at the airport, he asks one of them to take off his magenta tie. Mr. Jimmy explains that a magenta alarm is the worst kind of alarm on an oilrig. No prizes for guessing what the color of the alarm that goes off when the well blows. When Mike first meets Dale, Dale invites him to a night of fishing. Mike doubts that anybody will be fishing that night. Dale also tries to bet Mike that they'll back at the same spot. Mike doesn't take him up on it. We know that they wouldn't. Bubbles also ominously appear on the sea floor, deep below the rig, before the blowout occurs. Several of the shots on the rig before it explodes prominently feature either first aid kits, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors (some of which Mike was fixing), and/or life vests. Don't forget the most ironically-timed safety award ever.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_a10775b7	type	Mean Boss
Deepwater Horizon / int_a10775b7	comment	Mean Boss: The higher ups and more middle management types at BP, to put it extremely mildly, don't come off very well. The hands-on supervisors right above the regular rig workers, though, show serious foresight and suffer through the disaster just as much as everyone else.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_a7ca682e	type	Kitchen Sink Included
Deepwater Horizon / int_a7ca682e	comment	Kitchen Sink Included: Discussed (when the executive asks what is broken on the platform he gets a Long List - of course with the kitchen sink last) but no actual one shows up.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_a8559a9f	type	RealLife
Deepwater Horizon / int_a8559a9f	comment	This is somewhat subverted in the end given that Vidrine did survive the disaster while several others (including those that were just a few feet away from him) died horribly. In Real Life, Virdine (yes, he's a real person and not a Composite Character meant to personify BP malfeasance) wound up beating the wrap for manslaughter while being convicted for another charge.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_aa30e350	type	Sole Survivor
Deepwater Horizon / int_aa30e350	comment	Sole Survivor: The film has an odd example. Out of all of the people present in the drilling shack when the blowout occurs, Don, who is actually not part of the drilling crew, was actually leaving the control room when tragedy strikes. He becomes the only one to make it out alive.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_ab24b030	type	Red Alert
Deepwater Horizon / int_ab24b030	comment	Red Alert: Once they see the rig burst into flames, the nearby Damon Bankston goes to General Quarters, sounding the alarm and deploying a rescue boat to head to the Deepwater Horizon to recover survivors from the water that couldn't escape via lifeboat or life raft.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_ad1db87c	type	Oh, Crap!
Deepwater Horizon / int_ad1db87c	comment	Oh, Crap!: The crew have a strong moment of this when they see mud start welling up through the seals around the pipe.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_b10d7e8e	type	Head-in-the-Sand Management
Deepwater Horizon / int_b10d7e8e	comment	Head-in-the-Sand Management: Mr. Jimmy accuses the BP reps of such, comparing them to his uncle who never went to the dentist to find out what was wrong with his teeth, because then he'd have to do something about it.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_b3dce477	type	Recurring Camera Shot
Deepwater Horizon / int_b3dce477	comment	Recurring Camera Shot: Early on there's a shot of the gas port on the Williams' car as they fill up, followed by a shot of the fuel connection of the helicopter taking the crew out to the Horizon. These are likely relics from an earlier form of the film which was going to be a commentary on society's dependence on petroleum before it became a disaster film.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_b77808f2	type	"Where Are They Now?" Epilogue
Deepwater Horizon / int_b77808f2	comment	"Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Mike and Andrea eventually left Transocean. However, Jimmy stayed with them, and continued to work for Transocean until his death from cancer in 2021.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_bd9f9111	type	Strawman Has a Point
Deepwater Horizon / int_bd9f9111	comment	Strawman Has a Point: Discussed in-universe. Mike and Mr. Jimmy have a hard time refuting Vidrine's "bladder effect" hypothesis after the pressure test. Despite the unstable results of the test, Vidrine points out that if there was as much pressure as the computer said there was, there'd be drilling fluid seeping out of the well, and there wasn't. Mr. Jimmy ultimately couldn't argue with that, and grudgingly green-lit the drilling. Subverted, as there really was pressure in the well from all the oil and natural gas that crept up the drill pipe, which was responsible for the confusing results.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_c335b9ec	type	Irony
Deepwater Horizon / int_c335b9ec	comment	Irony: The day of the disaster BP presented the Horizon with their highest safety award. It sounds made up for the film. It wasn't. Vidrine disregarded the results of the first pressure test, claiming that it had to be a false reading. The second test he went with was the one that gave the false reading.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_c3c18143	type	Hope Spot
Deepwater Horizon / int_c3c18143	comment	Hope Spot: There are a few notable moments. When the toolpushers close the two annulars during the initial kick, stopping the chain of Disaster Dominoes, they have the sheer pressure break through both of them and shoot up the derrick. Later, Mike and Caleb manage to get the generators going again, which gives the bridge at least some control over the situation, but they lose power again almost immediately. Even when the workers try to cut the pipe, the blades are unable to penetrate it and get sheared off by the intense pressure, leaving them with no means to keep the rig's drift from tearing the well open.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_dca70c44	type	Reasonable Authority Figure
Deepwater Horizon / int_dca70c44	comment	Reasonable Authority Figure: Transocean Installation Manager Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) is a calm, logical, and plain-spoken man dealing with a tough situation even before it goes From Bad to Worse, and the mutual sympathy that he and his employees have is authentic.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_dcbe8a6e	type	Chekhov's Gunman
Deepwater Horizon / int_dcbe8a6e	comment	Chekhov's Gunman: The crane operator, Dale Burkeen, is seen briefly while Mike checks out the overall status of the rig. Dale later secures the loose crane when it threatens to basically knock the rig over.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_e16217f8	type	Historical Villain Upgrade
Deepwater Horizon / int_e16217f8	comment	Historical Villain Upgrade: Vidrine was absolutely culpable, but the film makes him out to be an irredeemable sociopath at worst and an unfeeling bureaucrat at best.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_e4ba33fc	type	Disaster Dominoes
Deepwater Horizon / int_e4ba33fc	comment	Disaster Dominoes: Just as in the real-life incident, the film portrayal of the disaster is a textbook case of disaster dominoes. The chain of progressing events go on in a way that each of them depend on the prior moment to occur. The removal of any of the events would have broken the chain or at least significantly slowed the progression of the disaster.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_e543a655	type	Light Is Not Good
Deepwater Horizon / int_e543a655	comment	Light Is Not Good: Or at least, it wasn't a good sign. After the blowout, natural gas seeped into the rig's air intakes leading into the engine, overworking it as it generated excess power. As a result, all the lights on the rig shone brighter than usual. It was the only warning the rig got, minutes before it was swallowed up in an explosive firestorm.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_e5fd8bc2	type	Hate Sink
Deepwater Horizon / int_e5fd8bc2	comment	It's worth noting again that even while Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza are real people, their portrayal in the film isn't quite true to life. For one, Vidrine wasn't the source of the "bladder effect" hypothesis. More generally, the business' constant pressure of "schedule over safety" was an institutional flaw in corporate philosophy, quite different than one or two men demanding success above all else. The manslaughter charges got dropped in large part since prosecutors believed Kaluza and Vidrine had gotten somewhat scapegoated for systemic corporate failures and poor processes. The quasi-composites serve as the audience's Hate Sink, understandable enough, in large part since they just happened to be the faces at ground zero. Neither Kaluza nor Vidrine were called to testify at the Coast Guard and other hearings following the disaster, but the testimony on record (available here) damns the general corporate attitudes that led to the disaster as a malformed philosophy throughout BP.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_eb81c601	type	Big Damn Heroes
Deepwater Horizon / int_eb81c601	comment	Big Damn Heroes: The crew of the Damon Bankston, who was supposed to just be there to collect the drilling mud and move on with the Deepwater Horizon to the next location for another oil well, were the first rescuers on scene when the whole nightmare began and the rig erupted in flames. They quickly sounded the Red Alert, deployed their rescue boat, and got their medical bay ready for the wounded and keep them safe until the USCG arrived to airlift the most injured back to Louisiana for medical treatment at the hospitals while the Bankston transported everyone else back by sea.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_f237981e	type	The Alleged Car
Deepwater Horizon / int_f237981e	comment	The Alleged Car: Andrea has spent a lot of time and effort getting her mustang to run but to no avail. Becomes a Chekhov's Gun when Mike tries to use it to talk Andrea out of her Heroic BSoD. The rig itself could qualify as an Alleged Boat. Mike informs us that 10% of the machinery onboard (roughly 300 in all) needs repair and can rattle dozens of them off the top of his head. Including the blowout preventer. All because BP wouldn't give them the time to fix them.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_f3d5d15f	type	Creepy Child
Deepwater Horizon / int_f3d5d15f	comment	Creepy Child: Downplayed. Mike's daughter knew a little too much as to how babies are made. And she seemed a little too interested in getting a baby brother. Mike and Felicia are just as creeped out as the audience may be.
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Deepwater Horizon / int_f4b1129f	type	Anger Born of Worry
Deepwater Horizon / int_f4b1129f	comment	Anger Born of Worry: When they get to the hotel, Mike is accosted by a man demanding to know where his son is. When Mike can't answer, the guy gets belligerent, yelling at him until security comes and drags him off, still demanding that someone tell him something.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Deepwater Horizon	hasFeature	A Tragedy of Impulsiveness / int_2010e6ea
Deepwater Horizon	hasFeature	Creator Cameo / int_2010e6ea
Deepwater Horizon	hasFeature	Films of 2015â€“2019 / int_2010e6ea
Deepwater Horizon	hasFeature	Lecture as Exposition / int_2010e6ea
Deepwater Horizon	hasFeature	The Big Board / int_2010e6ea
deepwaterhorizon	sameAs	Deepwater Horizon

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