Deepwater Horizon stirs up emotions
BATON ROUGE, LA. Arleen Weise was apprehensive when she learned Hollywood was making a movie about the offshore explosion that killed her son, Adam, and 10 others on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
Watching an advance screening last month stoked her grief and anger, and the shock hasn’t quite worn off yet. Weise said she’s still struggling over how the movie portrays the last day of her son’s life on the rig off Louisiana’s coast.
“The first viewing of it is shocking for a family member to see that,” she said. “Hearing and seeing are always two different things.”
Weise and other relatives of the 11 workers who died in the 2010 rig explosion hope it will remind people about the disaster’s human toll. Many family members believe a focus on the catastrophic environmental damage from BP’s massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico unjustly overshadowed the deaths of their loved ones.
Director Peter Berg reached out to family members. “I know how personal this story is to you,” he wrote to Shelley Anderson, the widow of Jason Anderson. “The film is meant to honour and pay tribute to all the men and women (on the rig), especially the heroic men, like Jason, who lost their lives.”