BP slams new ‘Deepwater Horizon’ movie

BP is hitting back at “Deepwater Horizon,” a film about the 2010 rig explosion and oil spill, calling it inaccurate and an unfair portrayal of the restoration work the company has undertaken.

“The ‘Deepwater Horizon’ movie is Hollywood’s take on a tragic and complex accident,” Geoff Morrell, a U.S. spokesman for BP, said in a Friday statement. 

{mosads}“It is not an accurate portrayal of the events that led to the accident, our people, or the character of our company.”

“Deepwater Horizon” dramatizes the explosion of an offshore oil rig at a BP drilling site, an event that killed 11 people and released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. 

BP has paid billions of dollars in fines, cleanup costs and legal settlements stemming from the event, which is one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

The “Deepwater Horizon” film, starring Mark Wahlberg, hits theaters on Friday. Critics have given it good reviews, but fact-checkers have questioned aspects of the story.

A Financial Times review says it “tells only a partial version of the story, setting up a simplistic opposition between the heroes of Transocean, which owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon rig, and the villains of BP.” 

Both companies have been found at fault for the incident, and Transocean has also paid more than $1 billion to settle lawsuits following the incident. 

The film “ignores the conclusions reached by every official investigation: that the accident was the result of multiple errors made by a number of companies,” BP’s statement said. 

—This post was updated at 1:39 p.m.