A Real Disaster At The Movies

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So it was Friday night and I'd arranged to go to the cinema with my friends to see the disaster movie Deepwater Horizon. It's about an oil rig that exploded and in which people died or something. Anyway, about an hour before we'd arranged to meet, the real disaster struck when every single one of my shit-house friends individually messaged to cancel on me. I mean, what was I meant to do? Only fucking losers go to the cinema alone on a Friday night and I obviously wasn't about to do that was I?! Anyway so I got to the cinema on my own and found my seat. I was trying to be discreet although in retrospect the flask of tea may have been a mistake. I took it with me because I'm English and we sometimes just can't help ourselves. Also I was alone at the cinema on a Friday night.. how much more could the other fuckers there really judge me?! Anyway so just as the film began I undid the lid and, forgetting how hot tea is, I accidentally unleashed so much steam that I pretty much turned my aisle into a fucking sauna. Now I think about it, perhaps this kind of thing is why nobody will come the cinema with me... On the bright-side however, as the giant sea-based oil rig began to explode, I couldn't help but feel that I'd actually created a much more immersive environment for everybody around me. So you know.. you're welcome!

Anyway, to quickly fill you in on the plot, Mark Wahlberg plays a salt-of-the-Earth chap. A real nice guy. And it's a great performance too. In fact, I barely even thought of that time Wahlberg went to prison for attempted murder after a racially motivated and unprovoked attack on a blind man. What a great guy he is here! Whilst working on an oil rig, his superior is played by Kurt Russell who I think is meant to be the health and safety guy on board. I say that simply because he seems to sneer at everything John Malkovich, his BP superior, is saying. However that could just be because he's simply trying to work out exactly what the fuck kind of weird accent Malkovich is doing. In fact, every time Malkovich gave an order, I wondered why people listened to him when quite clearly they should have been rushing him to the nearest fucking stroke ward.Whilst everybody else is playing their role pretty straight, Malkovich seems to think he's been cast as a panto dame and yet somehow I didn't find this to be a problem. I mean, it's his fault that shit hit's the fan and I definitely got the vibe that people in my audience were wanting to 'boo' every time he came on screen. Unless that was meant for me because they'd found the one lone loser in the screening they were at.

Obviously this film is based on a true-story, however I'm presuming that some degree of liberties were taken with it. Either that or a lot of the people involved in the real life incident responded to their emergency by going through the motions of a cliched disaster movie. There's one guy who sacrifices himself to control a crane which played out almost exactly like that bloke who jumped off a train and sank into some lava in 1997's shit flaming jam movie, Volcano. There's also a pretty on-the-nose set-up when Wahlberg's daughter recreates what her Dad does for a living with a can of coke and a straw and she fucks it up. In the way that all of the BP twats managed to avoid any criminal charges too, his daughter even got away with the mess that she made without getting a slap across the fucking chops. As Little Miss Exposition explains to us exactly what her Dad does for a living, she even summaries it with the phrase “My Daddy tames the dinosaurs”. However as Dr Ian Malcolm told us from the beginning, dinosaurs can't be tamed and so, like the odds of a shit-load of oil causing a rig to go titties up, “Life will find a way”. Perhaps this was meant to highlight a theme of the film- of man's constant warring with nature, but if it was, it was hugely overshadowed by the film's other theme of 'sometimes things go boom!'

However when we get to the half in which the shit quite literally hits the fan, I'd be lying if I said that the film didn't get an emotional response out of me. In fact, the carnage was so full-on and so devastating that I almost had to walk out of the screening for a second before I became too over-whelmed. In honesty, I don't actually know what happened to me but as the devastation escalated and the characters found themselves scrambling around, I found myself fighting back a mental breakdown. For a good forty minutes I was holding back tears and when the film was over I had to leg it out of the screening and to my car before anybody saw the shame of my glassy eyes. Although I guess they'd have just presumed I was like that because I was alone at the cinema due to my friends all being the treacherous tit-monkeys that they are. I can only guess that this response was because I'd actually invested in the characters too as I spent the second half hoping to hell that they'd all be alright. This was particularly the case for me in regards to Kurt Russell's character because as a fan of movies I obviously fucking love Kurt Russell and he was absolutely exceptional here. The poor sod was in the shower when the explosion happened and so he ended up having to deal with the additional challenge of surviving whilst having had his entire body glassed to fucking ribbons. Because things weren't tense enough, Russell essentially spends the second half of the movie playing Bruce Willis's foot from Die Hard.

Originally this film was to be directed by Margin Call's J.C Chandor who eventually left the project due to 'creative differences'. Presumably this meant that he wanted to make a film in which the entire incident was intellectually looked at on a forensic level, whereas Executive Producer Marky Mark Wahlberg wanted a film that emphasised how he was playing a real 'Merican hero. As such, his old Lone Survivor mate Peter Berg ended up directing because obviously if you're going to star in a film that could be directed by the genius behind A Most Violent Year, you'd definitely swap him for that bloke that made Battleships. However although all we got here is a Hollywood disaster movie in the vein of The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure, it turns out to be a really fucking good one. The Oil Rig set that was built was insanely detailed and believable, and every single cast member felt grounded and real. Well, except Malkovich, however 'the what the fuck is he?' thought that went through my head whenever I saw him seemed to be matched by every other character too. In which case I can only congratulate Berg on proving the old phrase to be true and being the stopped clock that's somehow managed to get the time right despite its obvious limitations.

I suppose it's kind of a shame that we won't see Chandor's version of this film if he'd planned on dealing as much with the aftermath of what happened in production as in the incident itself. Mostly because I remember at one point the real life Kevin Costner got himself involved with a bunch of scientists to build a machine that would clean the oil out of the sea. Perhaps one of the 'creative issues' that Chandor had was in finding an actor that looked and sounded like Kevin Costner and that was also able to act. Alas, despite now being from the director of the shit super-hero, shit super-hero film Hancock, I honestly thought that Deepwater Horizon was a brilliant movie that worked on every single level for me. I didn't like a bit at the end in which all of the survivors began praying but if it's a true story and they did that then I guess there's no harm in including it. Plus I like to think it was there ironically to show how stupid people are to believe that there's either a God or a God that loves them when they've just been blown to shit. This film managed to get a huge response out of me and I can only explain it as being due to the high-level of filmmaking on screen. Or the fact that I'd just bleached the flask I was drinking tea out of and there's a chance that I was experiencing a chemical high and slowly dying. Either way, I had an excellent time with this film and recommend it to everybody. Even my friends who, despite missing it with me, should still go to see this film before I'd like them to go fuck themselves. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.