Oil Spill Movies

Being that there has been so much news of late about oil spills, due to the big BP one in the gulf which has itself strangely disappeared from the news.    I started to think it might be a good time to write a script about an oil spill.  I began to wonder how many movies there were about oil spills and to my surprise I couldn't think of one...well maybe one.  I vaguely remembered a TV movie about the Exxon Valdez from eons ago. 

I did a keyword search on IMDB and came up with 21 matches, of the 21 most were doccos.  Two were  video games, one  called Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and the other called James Pond: Underwater Agent.  There were two TV episodes, one from Johnny Bravo: Endless Bummer/Jailbird Johnny/Bravo 13 and  Rescue 8 (1958 TV series): The Chasm. 

On the movie side of things there was a French movie called  Le diable probablement whose synopsis didn't say a word about oil and ended with the word suicide.  Charming. There was  Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster  which was that TV movie I vaguely remembered.  There was a DTV The 7 Adventures of Sinbad. Next...

The big features were Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home and On Deadly Ground, the first being an improbable story about a killer whale's friendship with a young boy (but if you ask me Willy's just waiting for his morsel to ripen).  And the second is Steven Seagal's most highly acclaimed work - 'nuff said.

And wait, I also found mention that there was a prophetic oil spill in the film Knowing.

Who would have known?

I was certain there were more. Phantoms, from the Dean Koontz novel of the same name, but that creature is only an oil-like substance, not a spill.  Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster?  I think the smog monster is just sludge and while sludge can be oil I don’t think that was the intention of the movie – nor is there an oil spill in it.

So there is a dearth of oil spill movies that aren't doccos.  It would seem to me that SyFy channel who just released Sharktopus could have a field day with the subject.  Or maybe I shouldn’t be giving them any ideas. 

So, forget SyFy, maybe we should all write a script about oil spills.  The news about them might be dying right now but there's always the next one.

What?  You didn't think there was going to be an next one?