This is a Netflix documentary released last year:
Hopefully the viewer remembered the Titan submersible
imploded due to extreme pressure on the carbon fiber vessel. Aside from
the opening that features news footage of the crazy week back in June
2023 (can you believe it’s been 2 ½ years already?), the actual day of
the implosion isn’t extensively covered in this documentary by any
means. That won’t exactly make it evergreen for any theoretical viewers
streaming the film-or downloading it straight to their cerebral cortex
or whatever technology we have decades from now-but I was someone who
viewed some YouTube videos in the months after the tragedy, that detail
wasn’t a big deal to me last night.
As we soon learned after the implosion, OceanGate owner/CEO/Grand Poobah Stockton Rush is solely responsible for what occurred. He was a fool from old money who wanted to make deep sea exploration more accessible by creating submersibles that were much lighter than the ones made of steel/titanium. Admirable, except that the vehicle was unsuited for diving 4 thousand meters down to visit the wreck of the Titanic. Besides the talking head interviews (which included several key employees who left OceanGate before the tragedy), plenty of footage filmed of Rush and OceanGate demonstrated that Rush was not only a stubborn fool who refused to admit defeat and refused to certify Titan, he was a narcissist and as a former employee referred to him as, “borderline sociopathic.” He threatened to ruin people’s lives just because they strongly disagreed with his refusal to change his doomed plans.
Some criticisms are worthwhile… we didn’t really need some YouTuber I’d never heard of (no matter how many millions subscribe to him) for a few minutes only because he was on a failed dive soon before that tragic day… be that as it may, I was still a fan of this documentary. Hearing from the ex-employees, the whistleblowers, the lead investigator from the Coast Guard, etc., the footage of Rush’s abhorrent behavior, clips from the government hearing of the accident-that was all interesting to see and helped me better understand the events of that day.
My non-fiction/documentary bias may be showing here but I should see more of Netflix’s offerings in the genre in the future. Perhaps not all their true crime efforts (I know more than one is rather controversial) but otherwise…
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