History Film / DeepwaterHorizon

* WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue: Mike and Andrea eventually left Transocean. However, Jimmy is still with them.

* SoftWater: A special [[AvertedTrope aversion]] takes place here. [[TruthInTelevision 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.

--> "CAN'T YOU SEE IT'S ON FIRE?!?!"

** No witness accounts corroborate rig worker Dale Burkeen (Creator/JasonKirkpatrick) performing a HeroicSacrifice to move a massive crane and rescue his friends. Instead, he had already been operating the crane, right in harms way, when disaster struck. However, he did indeed work to move the equipment before struggling to get to safety. In the film as well as real-life, he sadly dies in the process.

* TheBigBoard: BP corporate figure Don Vidrine (Creator/JohnMalkovich) uses this to draw a [[ExpositionDiagram large diagram]] illustrating his idea as to why the negative flow test (a 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.

* CreepyChild: 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.

* {{Irony}}: The day of the disaster BP presented the ''Horizon'' with their highest safety award. [[NotMakingThisUpDisclaimer It sounds made up for the film. [[TruthInTelevision It wasn't.]]

* {{Irony}}: The day of the disaster BP presented the ''Horizon'' with their highest safety award. It sounds made up for the film. [[TruthInTelevision It wasn't.]]

* AdaptationalHeroism: 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.

* RedAlert: 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.

* StrawmanHasAPoint: 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 a 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.

* HopeSpot: There are a few notable moments. When the toolpushers close the two annulars during the initial kick, stopping the chain of DisasterDominoes, they have the sheer pressure break through both of them and shoot up the derrick. Later, characters 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.

* NauseaFuel: Characters have their bodies painted in shards of broken glass as well as doused with layers of noxious drilling mud and wellbore fluids. How viscerally horrifying it is gets magnified by the fact that the audience knows ahead of time that several of them are about to die.

* DisasterDominoes: Just as in the real-life incident, the film portrayal of the diaster 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.

* AnalogyBackfire: 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 (Roy Kemp) later retorts that cats aren't nervous, and that he had a cat who mounted his Labrador.

* OutOfTheFryingPan: When the well blows, foreman Jason Anderson tries to get two of the roughnecks (Shane Roshcho and Adam Weisze) to safety by sending them to mud pits. Unfortunately, the mud pits were in even worse shape, as the 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 (not claiming the lives of everyone down there. Including the two roughnecks who were taking refuge.

* CreepyChild: The little girl at the beginning.

** When the main protagonist's daughter, Sydney, has finished her kitchen table presentation (a partial case of LectureAsExposition, as she's only preparing for the actual presentation), the honey ("mud") gives way and the soda ("oil") comes shooting up the pipe.

* ForegoneConclusion: The audience knows that the rig is going to turn into a fiery hellhole sooner or later, and the slowly building tension throughout the first part of the film is reminiscent of a horror movie.

* HeroicSacrifice: Dale the crane operator tries to secure a crane that's about to knock a bunch of material over, dooming his friends. He succeeds but gets killed when flying debris blows him out of the operator's cab. The other workers react in horror.

'''''Deepwater Horizon''''' is a 2016 dramatization of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_explosion Transocean Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010.]] Creator/MarkWahlberg, Creator/KurtRussell, Creator/JohnMalkovich, and Creator/KateHudson star alongside relative newcomers Creator/DylanOBrien and Creator/GinaRodriguez in a production that depicts the start of the worst oil spill disaster in U.S. history. Many of the characters direct representations of real people, including protagonist Mike Williams (played by Wahlberg).

* AdaptationalAttractiveness: To be expected, given that the normal, real-life characters are played by model-like Hollywood A-listers Creator/MarkWahlberg and Creator/KateHudson.
* AdaptationDistillation: The movie barely touches on the disaster ''after'' the rig sinks. This counts as PragmaticAdaptation as well given how agonizingly depressing the entire situation was from the very beginning, with no single film able to depict all of the related details. The vast amount of oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico virtually sterilized it and destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds upon hundreds of people. It took drilling multiple relief wells over ''months'' of time to finally bring the massive oil spill under control. Even years and years later, shrimp and fish got found with major birth defects and other damage from the spill.

* AgonyOfTheFeet: Rig manager Jimmy Harrell (Creator/KurtRussell) 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 (Creator/MarkWahlberg) 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. This counts as mild to severe squick for the audience in both cases.

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: The film has several instances.

** The Transocean crew that actually operates the rig is portrayed at almost complete loggerheads with their BP higher-ups. This is considerably exaggerated compared to the more ambiguous situation in real-life.Some Transocean personnel actually did argue to go ahead with the drilling, and BP people felt unsure enough to asked for additional guidance.

** No witness accounts corroborate rig worker Dale Burkeen (Creator/JasonKirkpatrick) performing a HeroicSacrifice to move the cranes and rescue his friends. Instead, he had already been operating the cranes, right in harms way, when disaster struck. However, he did indeed work to move the crane before struggling to get to safety. In the film as well as real-life, he sadly dies in the process.

** 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, [[TemptingFate well...]]

* DisasterDominoes: Just as in the real-life incident, the film portrayal is a textbook case of Disaster Dominoes. The chain of progressing events depend on the prior event to occur, and the removal of any of the events would have broken the chain (or at least significantly slowed progression).

** When Sydney's through with her presentation (see LectureAsExposition), the honey (mud) gives way and the soda (oil) comes shooting up the pipe.

* HateSink: Two words. Don Vidrine. [[Creator/JohnMalkovich John Malkovich's]] smarmy corporate {{jerkass}} gives the Weyland-Yutani Corporation a run for their money. [[note]]Somewhat unjustified, as both Vidrine and Kaluza, while portrayed as uncaring villains in the film, were not personally responsible for the disaster; they were representatives of a flawed corporate culture, but were not acting independently or out of line with the company's overall attitudes.[[/note]]

* HeroicSacrifice: Dale the crane operator secures a crane that's about to knock the rig over but is killed when flying debris blows him out of the operator's cab.

* HopeSpot: There are a few; when the toolpushers close the two annulars during the initial kick, only for the sheer pressure to break through both of them and shoot up the derrick. Then when they 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. Then when they 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.

* {{Irony}}: The day of the disaster BP presented the ''Horizon'' with their highest safety award.
* LaserGuidedKarma: Vidrine had a lot of direct responsibility for the blowout (in the film for sure, at least, while in real-life it's more 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.

*** It's worth noting that while Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza are real people, their portrayal in the film isn't true to life; they were significantly villainized. [[note]]Vidrine wasn't the source of the "bladder effect" hypothesis, for one example, and much of the pressure of "schedule over safety" was an institutional flaw in corporate philosophy rather than one or two men demanding success above all else. The reason the manslaughter charges were dropped was that prosecutors realized that charging Vidrine and Kaluza amounted to scapegoating them for systemic corporate failures and poor process. Thus, while Vidrine and Kaluza are actual people, they are nevertheless quasi-composites serving as the audience's HateSink. While neither Vidrine nor Kaluza were called to testify at the Coast Guard and other hearings following the disaster, the testimony on record (available [[http://www.csb.gov/macondo-blowout-and-explosion/ here]]) does show that the pressures and attitudes that led to the disaster were corporate philosophy, not individual villainy; they just happened to be the faces at ground zero.[[/note]]
* LectureAsExposition: Not quite, we just see the practice for one. Sydney's demonstration of Mike's job involves shaking a can of soda up, then punching a metal pipe into it, followed by pouring honey down the pipe to keep the soda from coming out, which will show her classmates (and shows the audience) what drilling mud is and how it works.

* NotEvenBotheringWithTheAccent: As in [[Film/LoneSurvivor his previous Berg outing]], Mark Wahlberg attempts his subject's southern accent for about one scene before dropping into his familiar Boston accent. Ultimately this works, as his attempted southern twang is much more distracting than his expected Boston accent.
* OhCrap: The crew when they see mud start welling up through the seals around the pipe.

* SoftWater: A special [[AvertedTrope aversion]] here. [[TruthInTelevision 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'.
* SoleSurvivor: 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 and becomes the only one to make it out alive.

* WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue: Mike and Andrea eventually left Transocean, while Jimmy is still with them.

** An early scene shows the preparation for a school project about how the rigs "tames the dinosaurs" by digging for oil. Sure enough, a driller finds a fossil tooth for one of the protagonists to take home. It's cute, but it's all fiction.

* TheBigBoard: Don uses this to draw a [[ExpositionDiagram diagram]] illustrating his idea for why the negative flow test had such a high reading but no mud came shooting back up. While the trope is played straight, the people in the room with him regard his theory with strong skepticism.

Deepwater Horizon is a 2016 dramatization of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_explosion Transocean Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010.]] Creator/MarkWahlberg, Creator/KurtRussell, Creator/JohnMalkovich, and Creator/KateHudson star alongside relative newcomers Creator/DylanOBrien and Creator/GinaRodriguez in a production that depicts the start of the worst oil spill disaster in U.S. history. Many of the characters 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, but when a test of the well they insist on running results in a pressure blowout, a series of events [[GoneHorriblyWrong cascades out of control]], [[FromBadToWorse threatening the entire rig and the lives of]] ''[[GoneHorriblyWrong everyone]]'' [[GoneHorriblyWrong on board]].

** In fact, the actual cause of the leak was only conclusively proven after the Blow Out Preventer was lifted off the sea bed and examined. [[https://www.workboat.com/news/offshore/deepwater-horizon-blowout-preventer-failed-due-to-unrecognized-pipe-buckling-report-says/ It turned out to have contained a rather serious design defect]], which meant the leak continued even after the "scram button" was repeatedly pressed.
* AgonyOfTheFeet: when Jimmy has to pull out of his bare foot a long shard of glass that pierced it when the explosion threw him around like a ragdoll; later on Jimmy and Mike 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.
* ArtisticLicenseGeology: 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. Pretty strong case of the RuleOfPerception: audiences get more of a sense of the oil being a trapped monster ready to burst.
* ArtisticLicenseHistory: Several instances:
** An early scene shows the preparation for a school project about how the rigs "tames the dinosaurs" by digging for oil. Sure enough, a driller finds a [[UsefulNotes/Dinosaurs dinosaur tooth]] for one of the protagonists to take home. It's cute, but it's all fiction.
** Transocean employee Andrea Fleytas (Creator/GinaRodriguez) fights her boss over sounding a critical alarm when gas starts rushing into where the drilling crew is. The understandable truth is that she suddenly faced an array of warning lights going off all at once and got overwhelmed. Downside of the BillionsOfButtons found in many real-life industrial scenes.
** No witness accounts corroborate Dale performing a HeroicSacrifice to move the cranes and rescue his friends. Instead, he had already been operating the cranes. However, he did indeed work to move the crane before struggling to get to safety.

* BadBoss: 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.

** Transocean employee Andrea Fleytas (Creator/GinaRodriguez) fights her boss over sounding a critical alarm when gas starts rushing into where the drilling crew is. The understandable truth is that she suddenly faced an array of warning lights going off all at once and got overwhelmed. Downside of the BillionsOfButtons in many real-life industrial scenes.