Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea

This is a new Netflix documentary that sadly was a bit of a letdown: 

This is a Netflix documentary I am disappointed in. The reason for viewing: more than one YouTube video has been viewed of this incident. On January 13, 2012, the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia passed by too closely to the reef off the shore of Giglio Island, Italy, resulting in a huge gash that sunk the ship.

It was nice to hear from both passengers and the crew of the ship as the villain of this story (Captain Francesco Schettino) decided to deviate from the route to sail that close to the island… to impress the people of the island and allegedly, to also impress his mistress… but this did not bring up the mistress aspect at all, nor that on the bridge he wasn’t wearing his glasses. I’m not sure why they tried to downplay the Captain’s role, but that was baffling. Arguably, Shipwrecked should have better stressed how poor a decision it was to deviate from the route. Some have mentioned that they should have paid better tribute to those that lost their lives; agreed, plus they didn’t even have a tribute to those individuals, not even a blurb. 

Yeah, they did at least present that Schettino was an A-hole who waited WAY too long to call evacuation, then worst of all abandoned ship (deliberately ignoring the orders of the Coast Guard) instead of going down with the ship-figuratively… they’re supposed to leave last. Besides hearing from those on the ship giving their thoughts on what a disaster this was, footage filmed on the night and the days after was truly fascinating.

However, the complaints I’ve heard that this should have included more technical detail and less extraneous details from the passengers… yeah, that can be argued. That said, I recommend reading the Wiki article concerning this tragedy for the proper context. Those YouTube videos I saw were only like 20 minutes long; no specific examples can be given of videos that are at least an hour long but I’m sure a proper search plus reading the comments can guide you in the right direction as they will for me eventually. Hopefully those will do a better job of properly raking Francesco Schettino over the coals.