By Travis Johnson
The first trailer for Deepwater Horizon, Peter Berg’s big screen version of the real life 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, is here, and it brings with it all the pathos and drama you’d expect. Mark Wahlberg is our everyman hero, Kate Hudson is his wife back home, and Kurt Russell, looking a lot like Tom Skerritt here, is a gruff father figure (if he’s Wahlberg’s father in law, that’d be a nice bit of metafiction). Meanwhile, John Malkovich turns up as the kind of bottom-line-worshipping company man you always get in these kind of things, and the ensemble is rounded out by the likes of Gina Rodriguez, Dylan O’Brien and Ethan Suplee.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster was, of course, a real event and in addition to the massive environmental damage, eleven men died. It will be interesting to see how closely the film hews to the known facts and what is invented for the sake of narrative cohesion. Given that Berg has been known to twist events for his own dramatic and thematic purposes in the past (Lone Survivor is, at best, propaganda), things could go either way – still, the trailer looks good.
Deepwater Horizon hits Australian cinemas on October 6, 2016.
