Built around a rousing tale of real-life heroism, Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon seemed poised to follow Clint Eastwood’s Sully as a box-office hit. After all, both come from directors who have proved adept at feeding the appetite for stories of blue-collar heroism: Berg with Lone Survivor, which made more than $125m at the US box office, and Eastwood with American Sniper, which grossed nearly three times that amount.
But as Sully, still playing strong in its fourth week of release, crossed the $100m mark, putting it on track to be Eastwood’s third-highest-grossing movie ever, Deepwater foundered, opening in second place behind Tim Burton’s young adult fantasy Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Although Deepwater’s A- CinemaScore indicated that audiences were largely satisfied with what they saw, those audiences were smaller, and older, than a film of its estimated $110m scale needed; according to the Hollywood Reporter, two-thirds of the film’s opening weekend came from viewers over the age of 35.
What accounts for the disparity? Start with the fact that although Deepwater Horizon focuses on those who survived the huge explosion on a deep-sea oil rig in 2010, the premise suggests something more akin to a snuff film, or at least a horror movie. Deepwater’s $20m opening weekend narrowly bested the figure for Michael Bay’s 13 Hours, which recounted the Benghazi attacks that left four Americans dead. In both cases, we know in advance the story doesn’t end well, and in the case of Deepwater Horizon, where the explosion was followed by the most catastrophic oil spill in history, we know it gets even worse.
Both Sully and Deepwater Horizon are framed by after-the-fact investigations into what went wrong: Sully begins with Tom Hanks’ Chesley Sullenberger safe in his hotel bed after safely landing a disabled passenger jet on the Hudson river; the first words we hear in Deepwater Horizon are those of the electrical technician Mike Williams, the real-life version of Mark Wahlberg’s character, testifying at a public hearing. The films present themselves as the fruits of forensic investigations, even though both take substantial liberties with the truth: Sully invents, virtually out of whole cloth, a conflict between Sullenberger and the crash investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, who see him as a reckless hotdog rather than a cool-headed hero; and Deepwater contrives to move Wahlberg’s character all over the rig, the better to give the audience a single protagonist to latch on to. (Berg was brought on to Deepwater Horizon after the firing of the original director, JC Chandor, who planned a more “kaleidoscopic” approach; the film’s producer said he preferred the “movie-star version”.)
But the investigations of Sully and Deepwater Horizon produce very different results. Although investigators try their best to tar Sullenberger’s name, he’s found to be blameless (or should that be “unsullied”)? From Sullenberger’s repeated nightmare of a jet crashing into lower Manhattan to the union rep who tells him, “It’s been a while since New York had good news, especially with an airplane in it,” the movie makes the analogy to 9/11 explicit, but this is a disaster everyone makes it through unscathed. “It wasn’t just me,” the real Sullenberger tells his passengers in the film’s coda. “We all did it. We survived.”
In Deepwater Horizon, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The movie heaps most of it on BP’s Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza, who urge the rig’s crew to bypass safety measures in the name of getting the petroleum giant’s drilling operation back on schedule; John Malkovich plays the former as an oily Cajun who all but sprouts horns. But it shows us a dozen places where the rig’s personnel could have stood their ground and didn’t, right down to the moment a lifeboat pulls away from the flaming wreck and one of the characters who remains observes, “They left us.”
Not only that, but the movie underlines the real reason those roughnecks are out there, risking their lives drilling ever deeper and riskier wells: our bottomless appetite for oil. As Wahlberg’s character makes his way to the Deepwater Horizon, Berg pauses to watch him gas up his car, and throws in a shot of the helicopter that will take him the last step of the way fuelling up as well. As much as the soldiers in Lone Survivor – arguably more, even – those oil-rig workers are protecting our way of life. Sully is a disaster movie in which no one is responsible. In Deepwater Horizon, everyone is.
