I am a retired oil company engineer and early in my career was a drilling engineer. Later, I worked as an oil and gas production computer automation system engineer on a project in the West Lake Verret field in the Atchafalaya Swamp just outside Morgan City, Louisiana, where this movie was supposed to take place. The movie was entertaining, but I found it difficult to watch without noting a lot of inaccuracies having to do with the location and the drilling operation.
Usually in movies about the oil industry, the terminology is totally screwed up. In this movie, the terminology was generally correct, but the drilling equipment was nothing like the real thing. I chuckled when they pulled the drill string out of the hole when a blowout was about to begin. Blowouts are generally caused by drilling at thousands of feet of depth into abnormally high pressure zones for that depth and for the density of the drilling mud. When the decision was made to come out of the hole, the man in the control room just hit the controls and out came the drill string in a matter of seconds with no assistance on the drilling floor. In real life, it would take a crew of roughnecks on the drilling floor hours to pull out thousands of feet of drill pipe.
Another serious flaw was the drilling equipment. Drilling rigs derricks are typically 100 or so feet tall to allow pulling drill pipe out in triples (three 30 foot joints of drilling pipe at a time). The derrick in the movie looked to be 30 or 40 feet tall, more like one used to drill water wells.
I'm surprised the commenter from Louisiana didn't say anything the discrepancies between the real Lake Verret and nearby Morgan City. There are no hills as are shown in the movie. The highest ground in that area is the levees built up around the Atchafalaya Swamp and the bayous. The water is muddy, not clear as shown. The bottom consists of many feet of mud, not nice clean gravel. In one of the opening scenes, one of the teenage "Cajun" girls pronounces Verret, the name of the lake, with the accent on the first syllable rather than the second. Later other actors pronounce it correctly. I was impressed however that early in the movie one of the bad guys pronounced "Atchafalaya" correctly with a silent "A".
Another thing I thought was curious was, although generally looking like a Cajun, Lou Diamond Philips' last name was Sanders, rather than something like Boudreaux. There are exceptions of course. Most of the rest of the natives had Cajun last names, but not him. Strange since he seemed to be portrayed to be a local.
Usually in movies about the oil industry, the terminology is totally screwed up. In this movie, the terminology was generally correct, but the drilling equipment was nothing like the real thing. I chuckled when they pulled the drill string out of the hole when a blowout was about to begin. Blowouts are generally caused by drilling at thousands of feet of depth into abnormally high pressure zones for that depth and for the density of the drilling mud. When the decision was made to come out of the hole, the man in the control room just hit the controls and out came the drill string in a matter of seconds with no assistance on the drilling floor. In real life, it would take a crew of roughnecks on the drilling floor hours to pull out thousands of feet of drill pipe.
Another serious flaw was the drilling equipment. Drilling rigs derricks are typically 100 or so feet tall to allow pulling drill pipe out in triples (three 30 foot joints of drilling pipe at a time). The derrick in the movie looked to be 30 or 40 feet tall, more like one used to drill water wells.
I'm surprised the commenter from Louisiana didn't say anything the discrepancies between the real Lake Verret and nearby Morgan City. There are no hills as are shown in the movie. The highest ground in that area is the levees built up around the Atchafalaya Swamp and the bayous. The water is muddy, not clear as shown. The bottom consists of many feet of mud, not nice clean gravel. In one of the opening scenes, one of the teenage "Cajun" girls pronounces Verret, the name of the lake, with the accent on the first syllable rather than the second. Later other actors pronounce it correctly. I was impressed however that early in the movie one of the bad guys pronounced "Atchafalaya" correctly with a silent "A".
Another thing I thought was curious was, although generally looking like a Cajun, Lou Diamond Philips' last name was Sanders, rather than something like Boudreaux. There are exceptions of course. Most of the rest of the natives had Cajun last names, but not him. Strange since he seemed to be portrayed to be a local.