Deepwater Horizon

You'd think that if you were about to engage in dangerous intricate underwater oil extraction, you would want to make sure your equipment was running smoothly before enabling workplace operations.

You would just have to run some tests to ensure technological sustainability, to reasonably assess your endeavour's viability in terms of probable dependable reliance.

You've invested hundreds of millions, the project will make billions, it's just a matter of time before the cash starts rolling in.

Why wouldn't you take steps to maximize workplace health & safety simply by testing your multi-million dollar equipment?

It's not just the integrity of your mechanical infrastructure that's at stake, but, much more importantly, the lives of your vital workforce would be imperilled if something went wrong.

Then you lose versatile hands-on resolute practical know-how, knowledge possessed by resilient workers who have actually worked in the productive field.

Life is more important than fluctuating budgets or financial forecasts, more integral than the projected bottom line.

I've never worked in an environment where people didn't take their jobs seriously.

But if you work somewhere where you feel your health is at risk, perhaps it's time to consider forming a union.

In Deepwater Horizon, a worst case scenario chaotically and volcanically presents itself, as managers overly concerned with budgetary delays neglect workplace health & safety.

Other managers contradict them and attempt to proceed according to safety guidelines, but they're unfortunately overruled and extreme disaster strikes.

A true story, it really happened, and many integral lives were lost, their names chronicled at the end of the film, so they'll never be forgotten.

Not to mention the environmental chaos that consequently ensued (and is likely still polluting delicate ecosystems to this day).

Catastrophic coastal confines.

What happened to all that oil?

It's obviously not simply offshore oil rigs that need to manage resilient efficiencies, if you casually apply economic relativity manifold applications effortlessly emerge.

If the company in Deepwater Horizon (BP) had tested their equipment, they would have hopefully found the problem, and many lives would have been saved and their rig wouldn't have been destroyed.

The profits may have started rolling in at a frustrating much later date.

But they would have kept rolling in after that.

And their workforce would have been safe.

Patriots Day

Once you move past the flag waving and the patriotism and the obsessive communal pride and the righteousness of it all, the ra ra ra, Patriots Day isn't so bad, a multidimensional humanistic account of the heroic men and women who boldly risked their lives to hunt down loathsome terrorists after they attacked the Boston Marathon crowd in 2013, a vile act objectifying infamy, the product of pathetic misplaced ambition, madly demonstrating sociopathic idiocy, fortunately they were caught and dealt with strictly.

Edited by Gabriel Fleming and Colby Parker Jr., multiple characters, each playing a role in the ensuing chaos, are intelligently introduced and skilfully interwoven, each short scene adding a bit more depth, each brief moment humanistically diversifying.

Thereby augmenting terrorist horrors.

One character shows up more often than the others, Mark Wahlberg as Sgt. Tommy Saunders, a wild passionate smartass police officer who never holds back what he's thinking.

Within a hierarchy, if the higher-ups have forgotten to take steps that you feel are necessary, it's important to delicately speak your mind, carefully choosing which battles to fight.

The fight is real and threatening in Patriots Day, so Saunders expresses himself freely throughout.

The film doesn't just focus on law enforcement however, it also provides the victims of the bombings with lots of screen time, as well as a brave young Chinese entrepreneur (Jimmy O. Yang as Dun Meng) whose knowledge leads to an explosive confrontation.

And there's cool little scenes too, like the rooftop zeroing-in where the national and the local colourfully exchange ideas, depth and pluralization consistently added, a sophisticated well-thought-out investigation of the city of Boston.

Which clearly responds to the Hollywood lumps it took in 2015.

With serious grit.

And undeniable attitude.

Like a mainstream independent film oddly focused on homeland security, Patriots Day shocks as it sweats, synergizes as it sizzles.

It makes it clear that it isn't encouraging Islamophobia either, carefully acknowledging that these were extremist lunatic exceptions.

Saunders delivers quite the speech in the end.

I didn't expect it to be so sensitive.

It maybe could have used a couple more takes, but it still courageously salutes discourses of the heartwarming, emphatically tenderizing amorous relations, which hopefully aren't criminalized due to some shortsighted jackass's bigoted ideals.

Legalizing love is a strange way to go about things.

People fall in love.

There's nothing more beautiful than that.

Battleship

Wasn't expecting to find a social democratic aesthetic at work in the latest alien invasion flick, Peter Berg's Battleship, but it's there, disguised in a maritime cloak, paying respect to multicultural nautical subjects, and demonstrating how an inclusive team excels.

As if the spirit of Battleship Potemkin is alive and well and theorizing what the Soviet Union's navy would have looked like after a century of reforms inspired by the courageous mutiny, distancing itself from its revolutionary heritage by codifying and transferring its content to 21st century American propaganda.

To battle a plutocratic blitzkrieg.

Can the aliens in Battleship be legitimately thought of as plutocrats?

Well, as environmental laws are repealed or gutted and scientific research is ignored in favour of religio-economic fanaticism (the misguided belief that the free market can do no wrong), the planet (or Canada at least) becomes more and more polluted. The 1% have the means through which to 'purify' their resources by purchasing expensive speciality ethically produced items without using credit excessively.  If fracking ruins their neighbourhood/district/region's water supply, they can move, easily, potentially beforehand after setting up the extraction.  Keeping abreast with technological advances, they can purchase or commission devices that can decontaminate their water even if they do stay while mitigating additional toxic effects.

The aliens who land in Battleship are technologically advanced, possess suits that shield them from that to which they cannot acclimatize (while protecting them from critical repercussions), are uninterested in the concerns of the citizens whom their policies disturb, and are using the military to pursue interplanetary colonialism.  

Sounds like fundamental plutocratic behaviour to me.

The international sailors who confront them however represent different ethnicities, socio-economic contingencies, genders, historical periods, and physical disabilities.

It's a well rounded group.  

They have no armour to protect them from the polluted Earth and must collegially improvise a strategic plan.

Not to naively present this social aesthetic as being ideally fine and dandy.

Before the invasion takes place egos collide and disorder persists.

Yet after a reason to work towards a collective goal presents itself, unity is restored.

The hierarchy within is troublesome yet look at how inclusive it is. Everyone has a voice regardless of rank whose logic is taken into consideration. When Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) suddenly finds himself in command and must make an immediate decision, his subordinate isn't afraid to challenge him in the pursuit of an alternative objective. Hopper even relinquishes command when it becomes clear that Japanese Captain Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) is a more suited candidate.

The fact that the confrontation takes place within a force field which separates the combatants from the world at large suggests that Battleship does indeed present a popularized plutocratic/social democratic dialectic insofar as these elements have been isolated and subjectified within an impenetrable ideological vacuum (let's find a way to represent these opposing approaches by creating a fictional polemical context within which they can aggressively interact), one which removes the concealments everyday life often necessitates.

The plutocrats through their blind ambition accidentally create a space within which their adversaries are capable of launching a constructive protest.

Because no matter how polluted things are, their adversaries are still capable of absorbing the sun.