The Documentary Wars rage on: Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is Netflix’s examination of the 2023 tragedy in which five people died during an undersea excursion to the Titanic wreckage, the film arriving on the heels of BBC’s Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster (now streaming on HBO Max). We’ve seen this situation before, with multiple platforms seemingly racing to release nonfiction movies about various hot-button sagas, including the GameStop stock market story, the Fyre Festival, Woodstock ’99 and, most recently, Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Here we’ll focus on director Mark Monroe’s Titan, an I-told-you-so doc that piles up evidence against one rich, and therefore powerful, man who died in the implosion, and could’ve prevented the catastrophe from happening.
The Gist: Get used to hearing the eerie ping and snap sounds that signal impending doom. That’s the sound of carbon fiber strands breaking in the hull of Titan, a five-person mini-submarine designed to travel 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The craft was the product of OceanGate, a company founded by CEO Stockton Rush, a generationally wealthy man who yearned to be an innovator like his heroes Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (you may pigeonhole at will). Rush’s goal was to take tourists to gawk at the remains of the Titanic – tourists who could afford the cost of the ticket, which the doc states began at a shade over $100,000, but Wikipedia says eventually cost $250,000 – and then sop up the fame and admiration (and profits, no doubt). You likely know what happened already; when Titan imploded on June 22, 2023, it was an international news story. Five people on board died, including Rush, Titanic researcher Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and Hamish Harding.
This documentary isn’t a tribute to those who died, but rather, fuel for the rage fire that’s no doubt burning inside their loved ones. Titan is frontloaded with news clips about the disaster, then tracks the history of OceanGate through the voices of the company’s former employees, journalists, Nargeolet’s grieving daughter, U.S. Coast Guard investigators, and even Titanic expert and filmmaker James Cameron, all of whom bemoan the fact that these deaths were preventable. “It was a mathematical certainty that (Titan) would fail,” an expert bluntly states about the craft that Rush helped bankroll and design. Rush launched OceanGate – hint: never put the word “gate” at the end of your company name – in 2016, and his innovation was to make the experimental submersible out of carbon fiber due to it being cheaper and more lightweight than steel or titanium. The material wasn’t ideal for underwater use, but he forged ahead anyway, blindly following the notion that he knows better than anyone, even the engineers and scientists he hired to design and build it, and fired when they disagreed with him or raised red flags about the potential for calamity.
One intriguing detail: Rush knew the limitations of carbon fiber, so he had his team implement a warning system that would amplify the sounds of the snapping fibers and signal that it was time to abort the mission and head to the surface. That ended up being just another sound for Rush to ignore alongside the dissenting voices, as he used a Playstation controller to pilot Titan on several successful sightseeing trips, essentially asking his passengers to pay no mind to the all-too-regular ping ping ping sounds. The film characterizes Rush as someone who loved the spotlight, and its assemblage of talking heads share how Rush was an arrogant narcissist who threatened and/or sued former employees, and purposely avoided affiliating the Titan project with any country in order to avoid third-party safety regulations. A couple of Titan passengers – including a CBS reporter who took a ride for a news story – talk about how they automatically trusted Rush and his safety assurances, and one YouTuber cries as he tells a story about how his Titan trip was scuttled due to weather, only to watch in horror as the very next Titan voyage ended tragically. The sound of the sub imploding, an eerie rumble, was captured 900 miles away by U.S. government researchers.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That eerie rumble, and the portrait of Rush as a doomed egotist, brings to mind Grizzly Man subject Timothy Treadwell, whose death-by-bear was captured on audio (that, notably, director Werner Herzog would not share in his film).
Performance Worth Watching: Exclusive to this doc is the participation of David Lochridge, who was hired to be Titan’s chief pilot, fired when he raised concerns, and became the key whistleblower against Rush and OceanGate. He’s animated in his testimony, and shares how frustrated he was when he lacked the money to continue legal proceedings against Rush.
Memorable Dialogue: “Wankers. That’s on camera.” – Lochridge’s response to being sued by Rush
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: As is often the case with narcissists, Rush hired a videographer to document years of OceanGate’s work, and said videographer, not Rush’s estate, owns the rights to the footage. That’s the only reason we get to see it, and it’s what ultimately beefs up Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, giving us a glimpse into the workings of the company, and scads of direct-to-the-camera narration by Rush. It allows us to armchair-psychoanalyze the guy as a tech-bro type who has the means to craft an echo chamber around him, sheltering his foolhardy schemes from dissent – if you have the energy to piece together another profile of a villain via scraps of upsetting information, that is.
Otherwise, the doc is a perfectly acceptable one-stop guide to what happened, with extra text about the fallibility of arrogance. Monroe’s narrative is initially a touch sloppy, starting with an assemblage of semi-ghoulish TV-news clips about the disaster, then hitting the main points of the story in brief so he can get to the U.S. Coast Guard’s investigation of it. From there, the film settles down for a detailed retelling, crosscutting between testimonies from the Coast Guard’s official hearings and the timeline of events via archival footage and talking heads. Titan can be overlong and repetitive as a variety of former OceanGate employees air their grievances about Rush. And even though Rush is rather obviously an entitled jerk, after a while, it feels like the movie is just piling on.
Monroe maintains his chosen angle of focus, for better or worse. He essentially glosses over how the legal system failed Lochridge and the doomed Titan passengers, and glances off the implications of comments by an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rep, who shares how he had to backburner his OceanGate investigation because he was overburdened with other cases. The director also chooses to avoid addressing the media-circus coverage of the tragedy – a hallmark of many, many other similar docs – which occasionally dipped into ugly schadenfreude. The OceanGate Disaster is ultimately functional despite its faults, and fills the streamer’s true-tragic-story hole until the story of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder prompts the next streaming-platform documentary chase.
Our Call: Titan: The OceanGate Disaster tends to state the obvious, but it’s still a reasonably thorough tick-tock of a modern tragedy. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.