‘Titan’ Review: Netflix’s OceanGate Documentary Gets Bogged Down in a Single Villain

Netflix’s “Titan: TheOceanGate Disaster” fails to discover the depths of the issues that led to the fateful implosion of the submersible that claimed five lives in Summer 2023, placing sole focus on Stockton Rush’s misdeeds.

On June 18, 2023, OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded and killed all five members aboard including the company’s CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush. A horrifying story that gripped the world’s attention, disturbing details emerged in the immediate aftermath such as the submersible being piloted through a PlayStation controller. But the story of Titan also fit into a familiar narrative of our age where a narcissistic individual cut corners to seek glory, and it ended up costing people’s lives.

For those unfamiliar with why Titan failed, Mark Monroe’s Netflix documentary “Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” provides a solid overview of what led to the submersible’s implosion. However, Monroe also appears reluctant to explore why OceanGate was able to reach its fatal final voyage and the factors that enabled Rush beyond his wealth and toxic personality. “Titan” wants to start and end with Rush’s actions when it feels like that conclusion is already littered on the story’s surface.

Monroe’s documentary largely covers the eight years leading up to Titan’s implosion, the figures who were initially brought on to make Rush’s vision a reality, and who subsequently left when it became clear how safety was secondary to cost and convenience. The main issue revolves arounds the use of carbon fiber for the ship’s hull instead of titanium or other metal typically used in submersibles. Carbon fiber is cheaper, both to manufacture and to transport, but it was largely untested as a material for deep sea exploration. Rather than switch to a sturdier material, OceanGate simply shrugged, added acoustic sensors that would note when a carbon fiber had snapped, and called it a safety measure. In a similar fashion, OceanGate got around regulations regarding crew and personnel qualifications by calling almost everyone involved a “mission specialist.” It was a sign of a company that functioned as an expression of Rush’s ego, but also a larger cultural mentality that rules get in the way of innovation and progress.

When “Titan” looks at the various players involved and includes the wealth of OceanGate’s footage from their tests and workshops, you have a feature that feels more immediate than the excellently written profiles covering the disaster. As valuable as articles from The New Yorker and WIRED are, there’s something particularly chilling about watching Rush in a test dive as we hear a “pop” of the carbon fiber strands breaking. Without resorting to recreations, Monroe paints an unnerving picture of what the final moments of the doomed Titan voyage may have been like without playing it as exploitative. More upsetting is how Rush could personally experience such a distinct warning and instead retaliate against the engineer who included the instruments that noted those warnings. In an endeavor that required maximum diligence, Rush repeatedly showed his fury not at failures, but at being made aware of failures.

Of course, it’s incredibly easy to say all of this now that Rush is dead, killed by his own carelessness, callousness and ignorance. Alive, he had the resources to silence his critics, and here we start to arrive at a far more damning indictment that goes far beyond one person. OceanGate’s head of marine operations, David Lochridge, became a whistleblower, but because Rush had the resources to bury Lochridge in legal fees, the marine operations head eventually had no choice but to withdraw his complaint, which in turn ended the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) investigation into OceanGate. A whistleblower system where the individual has no protections and can be financially beaten into submission to where the whole investigation stops is an indictment that goes far beyond OceanGate, but “Titan” only makes it a shocking beat that’s positioned as part of Rush’s vindictive and monomaniacal nature.

Once you start pulling at the threads surrounding the rise of OceanGate, a more fascinating tension emerges than the one the documentary presents. Instead of wholly blaming Rush, we can see how his marketing savvy and an incurious press gave him the latitude to sell a dangerous product. Perhaps Monroe felt that looking at the larger systems would appear like letting Rush off the hook, which is a fair decision. But with Rush as the center of the documentary’s ire, we can see how larger systems enabled his abuses. Regulations became minor obstacles that could be circumvented or outright ignored. The media became a marketing partner, never asking the tough questions but instead being dazzled by Rush’s sales pitch and the allure of visiting the wreck of the Titanic. When one journalist says in the aftermath, “we were misled,” I was taken aback. It didn’t occur to this reporter that the CEO may be trying to sell his product, and that further investigation was needed to verify his claims?

But these questions of marketing and sales luring people into a death trap linger at the margins of “Titan” while providing the cold comfort that Rush can no longer harm anyone else. While this is true, “Titan” has no answers regarding what will happen to the next person who replaces Rush. Nothing in the documentary indicates that a similarly well-funded and single-minded individual would have difficulty repeating his transgressions. In this way, “Titan” becomes another reassurance as empty as the one’s made by the film’s single villain. There will always be another Rush, and as far as I can understand from this documentary, there’s nothing to prevent him from sinking to a similar depth.
“Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” arrives on Netflix on June 11.

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