C

"Move fast and break things" goes according to plan in Titan: The OceanGate Disaster

A documentary accounting for how a company's egotistical leader got himself killed at the bottom of the ocean is as obvious as its subject.

Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what about those whose memories aren’t the problem? Those who are blinded by the hubris that they’re too smart, too rich, too well-equipped, too modern to fall into the same traps as those who came before? Is it worse to fail due to ignorance? Or to go in fully informed and choose folly anyway? These questions can apply both to the creator-passenger of the submersible Titan, who died in his sightseeing pursuit of the Titanic‘s wreckage, and the filmmakers of Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, who have made yet another disposable streaming documentary from a viral news story.

It’s not that the Netflix film from prolific documentary writer-producer Mark Monroe (whose work has spanned the sports world, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and—like any modern non-fiction filmmaker—UFOs) has the wrong idea about CEO Stockton Rush, his expedition company OceanGate, or the reasons behind the hull implosion that killed Titan‘s passengers in June 2023. It’s that, in telling a story that’s only being put to film in the first place because of how much schadenfreude online lookie-loos gained from it when it was happening live, the doc doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious.

In order not to be a whole movie based around irony-laden rubbernecking any more than it already inherently is, Titan: The OceanGate Disaster isn’t really about the implosion itself or those that died onboard. Instead of being quite so ghoulish, the film focuses on OceanGate as a company and Rush as its stereotypically egotistical leader. To hear the ex-employees interviewed by the filmmakers tell it, Rush was just another born-rich businessman afflicted with the “move fast and break things” mentality—one who ended up doing exactly that. It all moved quickly, then broke.

Journalist Mark Harris (whose work around OceanGate provides much of the film’s backbone) sets the stage for the rampant concerns around Titan‘s “carbon-fiber construction” and “Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation.” The film visualizes these ticking time-bomb elements through behind-the-scenes testing footage of the vessel’s materials and recorded testimony from public hearings after its failure. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster doesn’t need to go full Mythbusters around Titan‘s implosion. It’s clear that the pressure was too great for its hull, something that numerous employees caught and reported. The creaking, popping, fracturing noises of the carbon fiber—lined up with the graph-plotted warnings from an acoustic monitoring system in one of the film’s more inspired moments—is more than enough to get those who aren’t submarine engineers up to speed.

Because of this simple, demonstrable point of failure, the nearly two-hour documentary spends its time going over and over this point, and speaking to all the former OceanGate workers who quit before disaster sank the company. These interviewees, introduced with hammy titles like “The Insider” and “The Whistleblower” and scored with equally over-the-top music, all cover the same basic idea: This engineering Rush job was due entirely to the CEO, who would fire those who brought him safety concerns and lash out at his own experts. It’s no surprise that an entitled startup exec cut corners and evaded laws, but it does feel a little convenient that all the blame for this company’s janky sub can be placed at the feet of the guy who went down with the ship.

Titan: The OceanGate Disaster isn’t much for nuance, though, and freely cuts around some of the more tangled subplots it uncovers. The aforementioned whistleblower, former Director of Marine Operations David Lochridge, took his case to OSHA and got sued by OceanGate. The ensuing bureaucratic nightmare—in which an overburdened OSHA investigator shows the limitations of the agency and OceanGate’s attempt to drive Lochridge to financial ruin shows the limitations of the court system—has all the makings of an inside-baseball legal thriller, with disaster as its inevitable climax. But in order to match the buzz of the media sensation that Titan became, the doc is laser-focused on its villain.

Strangely, the film isn’t interested in why the disaster that killed Rush, Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, billionaires Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood’s son Suleman became such a hot topic. Despite opening with a news footage montage as bloodthirsty as anything from Nightcrawler, there’s little acknowledgement of the larger context around the world’s response. The Titanic / Titan connection, doubled down on by Rush’s insistence that his doomed submersible is “invulnerable” (can’t call a sub “unsinkable”), requires little analysis. But what about how the stepson of one of the billionaire passengers kept going viral by using his newfound audience to publicly flirt with sex workers and live-tweet concerts right after asking for thoughts and prayers? This blend of callous opportunism and extreme wealth was also at the heart of the disaster, and was a main reason people couldn’t look away as it was happening. More than the disasters covered by most corporate malfeasance documentaries, the cultural climate at the time was inextricably linked to how it was covered.

Stockton Rush was a vocal maker of especially unsafe petards, hellbent on being hoisted by one, so it’s hard to fault everyone who saw it coming from getting in front of a camera and getting in their “I told you so”s. This very desire, for the rich and arrogant to get some kind of comeuppance, is what drew everyone to the Titan‘s story in the first place. Ignoring the factors causing it to become a grim death spectacle—opting for the anodyne comfort of a documentary that simply seeks to make its audience say “Well, duh”—only tells the most dry and familiar part of the story.

Director: Mark Monroe
Release Date: June 11, 2025 (Netflix)

 
Join the discussion...