Environmentalists are pressuring actor Mark Wahlberg and Hollywood filmmakers to donate part of the profits from the action drama “Deepwater Horizon” to Gulf Coast restoration efforts.
The movie, which opens nationwide Friday, follows real-life accounts of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 oil workers and resulted in the largest oil spill in the history of the industry.
“The trailer makes it look like Mark Wahlberg’s character will be a hero amidst the tragedy that caused 11 men to lose their lives,” said Aaron Viles, the senior grassroots organizer for the group Care2. “But I know from firsthand experience that BP was no hero in the response.
“They lied about how much oil was being released and their response plan was found to be a work of fiction,” Viles said. “They also relied heavily on the use of chemical dispersant to break up their oil.”
A review of the movie published by the New York Times on Thursday paints a picture that may surprise Viles. The review said it’s full of action, but it’s also “a true-crime story,” which chronicles how and why “11 people were killed and a vast marine ecosystem was despoiled because of negligence and greed.”
The review compares the film to last year’s “The Big Short,” which provided a dramatic take on the Wall Street mortgage bubble that resulted in the 2008 recession as a result of corporate greed.
“Like ‘The Big Short,’ this film, directed by Peter Berg, dramatizes a broadly familiar story and stands as a work of popular narrative for an age of corporate impunity,” the Times’ review said. “The anger and grief you feel leaving the theater constitute a kind of catharsis, a modest symbolic compensation for the failure of justice in the real world.”
Viles, who worked for an environmental nonprofit in responding to the spill, has authored a petition to put pressure on Wahlberg, Berg and aligned filmmakers to donate a portion of the film’s profits to restoration efforts.
He said in the years after the spill, the chemicals used to break up the oil continue to be a problem for the Gulf’s sea life and residents.
“Significant clean-up worker health and environmental impacts have been linked to the dispersant,” Viles said in the petition. “BP’s unprecedented use of toxic dispersant was a massive science experiment on the people and environment of the Gulf.”
