BP oil spill aftermath

By – November 21, 2014

In Evaluation: The Fantastic Invisible (Documentary)

During a congressional hearing with oil business honchos following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, Exxon Mobil chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson made a startling — and hair-raising — candid admission: “whenever these exact things happen we have been perhaps not well-equipped to take care of them… you will have impacts.”

These “impacts” (the most Orwellian euphemisms since the Pentagon came up with “collateral damage”) range from the spilling of around 176 million gallons to the gulf coast of florida for 57 days after the April 20, 2010 surge aboard the Deepwater Horizon overseas oil-drilling rig operated by BP that killed 11 crewmen and devastated the Gulf’s ecosystem. Even though many associated with the aftereffects of the epic, apocalyptic blowout are hidden into naked-eye, the fireball it caused had been noticeable from 35 miles away.

Photo due to RADiUS-TWC The Great Invisible shows how the Deepwater Horizon disaster has actually impacted the lives of rig employees, oystermen, anglers and shrimpers of Louisiana, Alabama, Tx, and Mississippi.

Utilizing artfully intercut news films, archival footage, amateur movie, and initial interviews, award-winning filmmaker Margaret Brown — who is initially through the Gulf Coast — weaves a terrifying tapestry for which reveals how the catastrophe has actually impacted the lives of rig workers, oystermen, anglers and shrimpers of Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi. The movie also details the petroleum industry’s response (or insufficient) into the calamity as well as its aftermath. The fantastic Invisible’s executive producers are Jeff Skoll and Diane Weyermann of Participant Media, who additionally produced An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 weather change documentary featuring Al Gore that scored Academy Awards, a Grammy while the Nobel Peace Prize.

The 92-minute documentary’s most harrowing on camera interviews are with survivors for the big blast — roustabout Stephen Stone, who reportedly is affected with PTSD, therefore the rig’s chief professional Douglas Harold Brown, that has accompanied the ship on Gulf from Southern Korea, where it had been built in 2001.

Regretting which he ended up being a devoted cog within the oil industry’s wheel for way too long, Brown — who attempted to devote suicide following the debacle — acknowledges “I feel responsible because we played along.” While rock — that has been deeply traumatized because of the blast and subsequent shabby treatment because of the business - testifies before Congress, while he's heavily medicated and greatly drinking. Rock shows he stabs their own arm with scissors to “see basically feel.” At one point inside film, the camera peruses Stone’s bookshelf, which include books by atheists particularly Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and intriguingly his preferred book, Somerset Maugham’s classic The Razor’s Edge, about a shell-shocked World War I veteran’s religious pursuit of meaning.

Photo due to RADiUS-TWC Douglas Harold Brown, the Deepwater Horizon rig's main engineer during the time of the accident
regrets being a dedicated cog into the oil industry’s wheel.

Crewmen’s family members in addition go on the record. Stone’s partner displays a series of portraits she painted of topics using sad, haunted expressions. Lawyer Keith Jones, whose boy Gordon Jones passed away within the blast, speaks on the part of people who not any longer can.

We also see the toll the cataclysmic occasion has wrought on everyday people within the Gulf, specifically through the eyes of Roosevelt Harris, whom works the vehicle ministry for the Hemley Church Mobile Food Pantry at Bayou La Batre, Alabama. From a historical perspective it is interesting to see an African American man providing relief and maintain impoverished white Southerners, amongst others. As Harris places it inside the folksy, however eloquent way: “These individuals out right here be determined by the Bay online because of their living... Katrina just wiped the homes away and blowed in about 27 legs of liquid, notice? But the oil spill truly place a damper on every little thing.”

The spill, but performedn’t necessarily place a damper regarding rapacious oil industry, that the movie illustrates as duplicitous, stonewalling settlements, rather than offering fair settlements to those who this has afflicted, while as well overspending on TV adverts which paint a hunky-dory photo (in contrast to Sara Stone’s sorrowful portraits) for the so-called data recovery.

If staff members and Gulf individuals are portrayed as all-too-human, the exact same can’t be stated of this oil executives which testify before Congress and several ham-handed, stogie chomping hot shots the filmmaker seems to have encountered on Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. They show up across like stereotypical fat kitties portrayed in a Depression-era Frank Capra populist motion picture.