Titan: The OceanGate Disaster Review – A $250,000 Ticket to Oblivion

Titan: The OceanGate Disaster Review – A $250,000 Ticket to Oblivion

They called it cutting-edge. They called it revolutionary. They forgot to call it certified. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster isn’t just a documentary—it’s a slow, chilling autopsy of hubris disguised as innovation. This review isn’t here to mourn five lost souls at the bottom of the Atlantic. It’s here to ask how a $250,000 deathtrap sold itself as a tech miracle—and why everyone with a title looked the other way. Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster isn’t about what went wrong. It’s about the rot that made wrong inevitable.

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Titan: The OceanGate Disaster – Netflix Opens the Hatch on a Submarine Catastrophe—Review

Selling the Abyss: How OceanGate Marketed Deep-Sea Luxury

OceanGate wasn’t pitching marine science; it was hawking prestige tourism with a nihilistic twist. This wasn’t a research sub. This was a boutique coffin wrapped in startup gloss. The sales pitch came dressed in explorer cosplay and TED Talk buzzwords. For a cool $250,000, you too could brush rust with the Titanic—assuming the hull didn’t collapse first.

The film lays out how this operation was less Cousteau and more Theranos with a pressure gauge. OceanGate courted clients like they were VC investors, selling the illusion of participation in history while dodging maritime certifications like they were outdated fashion rules. The branding spoke in aspirational tones—innovation, disruption, access—standard tech-world filler that conveniently forgot the laws of physics still apply at 12,500 feet.

Through archival marketing footage and recorded pitches, the documentary about OceanGate shows a company obsessed with optics, not safety. This wasn’t about responsible exploration; it was about high-end tourism dressed in blue-lit Instagram bait.

Spectacle, Status, and the Sales Funnel

The real product wasn’t the dive—it was the story. A tight circle of elite adventurers, sold on the fantasy of “making history,” with just enough risk to make it feel cinematic. And Stockton Rush knew exactly how to package it. He wasn’t selling submersibles. He was selling legacy, the same way Blue Origin sells “astronaut status” to millionaires who get weightless for five minutes.

The film makes clear: this wasn’t incidental. Every brochure, every media quote, every photo of a billionaire beaming in front of a carbon-fiber capsule contributed to a seductive narrative. This was OceanGate’s marketing at its most aggressive—and most delusional. The passengers didn’t just buy a dive. They bought mythmaking. They just didn’t realize it came with a eulogy.

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Stockton Rush: Anatomy of an Ambition

The Man Who Believed His Own Pitch

Stockton Rush isn’t painted as a villain in this documentary—he’s something more frustrating. He’s a believer. And that’s the problem. The film peels back the self-made mythology and reveals a man intoxicated by his own TEDx monologues.

Through interviews and archival clips, the filmmakers trace how Rush styled himself as the Elon Musk of the ocean: disruptor, visionary, regulation skeptic. But unlike Musk, Rush didn’t have a board of engineers or a fleet of backup plans. He had a carbon-fiber tube, a Logitech controller, and a deep suspicion of rules.

This isn’t a biopic—it’s a slow-burn psychological unmasking. The portrait that emerges is sharp and unsentimental. Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, comes off less like a reckless innovator and more like someone who mistook charisma for competence. And nobody stopped him.

Psychology of a Tech Messiah

The film doesn’t need to say “hubris” out loud. It just lets Rush talk. His interviews drip with the kind of entrepreneurial arrogance you find in every bad founder memoir—risk romanticized, doubt framed as cowardice, expertise dismissed unless it affirms the vision. There’s a scene where he brags about avoiding certification because it “slows innovation.” That one line is the documentary’s thesis in miniature.

What the filmmakers do well—quietly, without editorial hand-holding—is construct a character study that makes clear this wasn’t just a technical failure. It was personal. This was a man with a mission, insulated by belief, and buoyed by his own narrative. The documentary’s analysis doesn’t offer redemption arcs or soft exits. It shows us the architect of disaster, drawn in his own words.

This is a character study of Rush and his role at OceanGate, and it’s grim. Not because he was evil, but because he was convinced he was right—right up until the ocean crushed the proof.

“Dropped Two WTs”: The Timeline of Catastrophe

June 18, 2023. The Titan submersible begins its descent into the North Atlantic, carrying five passengers and a mountain of corporate denial. What unfolds next is mapped by the documentary with unnerving precision. No dramatic scoring. No manipulative pacing. Just a cold, unrelenting countdown to obliteration.

From launch to implosion, the film charts the expedition’s timeline with technical clarity and narrative tension. It reconstructs the final hours using real-time logs, last messages, and acoustic data. The last known transmission—”Dropped two WTs”—is dissected not for poetry, but for what it meant: weight jettisoned, buoyancy adjusted, and then… silence.

How the documentary explains Titan’s final moments in this sequence aren’t flashy. They’re surgical. The timeline isn’t just a recap. It’s an indictment of every earlier decision.

A Disaster in Milliseconds

The film doesn’t dramatize the implosion—it doesn’t need to. A pressure failure at 3,500 meters doesn’t offer time for suspense. The sub didn’t descend into chaos. It vanished. The implosion of the Titan is explained in exacting, brutal terms: the pressure hull failed, the cabin collapsed inward at 1,500 mph, and human awareness never had a chance to register anything.

And that’s the most disturbing part. There was no warning. No alarms. No emergency footage. Just a timeline that ends mid-sentence. How the documentary explains the OceanGate disaster in this section isn’t about shock—it’s about inevitability.

The way the documentary handles these moments is its quietest strength. No drama. No swelling music. Just facts. And the facts do all the screaming.

TITAN: The OceanGate Disaster | Official Trailer

Engineering, Decisions, and the Whistle that Blew

Carbon Fiber Dreams: The Science That Wasn’t There

Here’s the thing about carbon fiber—it’s strong, light, and absolutely the wrong material to rely on when you’re diving three Empire State Buildings below the ocean’s surface. In Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, the film doesn’t just throw around technical jargon. It lays out, piece by piece, the brutal mismatch between materials science and marketing bravado.

Titan’s pressure hull, made from carbon fiber composite, was essentially an engineering gamble. There’s a reason certified deep-diving submersibles use titanium or steel: those materials behave predictably under crushing pressure. Carbon fiber? Not so much. It delaminates, it fatigues in weird ways, and once it starts to fail, you don’t get a second chance.

The documentary uses expert commentary and technical reconstructions to spell out how the Titan’s carbon fiber failure wasn’t a surprise—it was baked into the build. What’s more unnerving is how OceanGate insisted it was “cutting-edge innovation,” when in reality, the submersible design flaws were already red-flagged by people who knew what they were talking about.

Engineering by Optimism, Not Science

This wasn’t an issue of unpredictable failure. It was a matter of known risks ignored. The film’s critique of the engineering isn’t framed as a post-mortem—it reads like a warning memo that was mailed two years too late. Several engineers had already called out the limitations of carbon fiber under cyclical loading conditions. OceanGate just kept diving.

There’s a quote in the documentary where one expert describes the Titan’s design as “bold but uninformed.” That’s generous. The deeper takeaway is that this was a company treating ocean pressure like a variable that could be finessed through confidence and branding. It’s here that the film frames the whole saga as the controversy over Titan’s safety design—not just a tragic failure, but a textbook case of engineered denial.

Red Flags in Plain Sight: The DIY Decisions That Doomed Titan

Building a Submersible Like It’s a Science Fair Project

Let’s talk hardware. Specifically, the Logitech F710 controller that was used to pilot Titan. Yes, the video game controller used on Titan was real—and no, it wasn’t just a quirky detail. It was symptomatic of a deeper philosophy at OceanGate: innovation as performance art.

The documentary doesn’t sensationalize this. It just shows the receipts. Uncertified portholes that were only rated to a fraction of the target depth. Ballast systems that relied on jury-rigged mechanisms. A deliberate decision not to seek classification from maritime regulatory bodies. These weren’t bugs. They were features.

What the film does so effectively is line up these decisions side-by-side with their justifications. Every “cost-saving measure” is followed by footage or interviews illustrating the safety concerns they generated. Each one comes off less like a design compromise and more like a dare.

Normalizing the Absurd Until It Implodes

This wasn’t a one-off tech gimmick. It was a systemic mindset. At some point, OceanGate stopped seeing warning signs as problems and started branding them as “disruptive thinking.” The problem is, the ocean doesn’t care about thought leadership. It just compresses everything evenly at 5,000 pounds per square inch.

The design decisions exposed in the documentary—down to the materials, the sensors, the emergency protocols (or lack thereof)—are treated with the same deadpan tone the film uses elsewhere. No melodrama. Just a list of decisions that now feel like gallows humor. And what’s most damning is that many of these red flags were raised internally, which brings us to the people who tried to stop it.

This was never just about unconventional engineering. It was about OceanGate’s unconventional submersible controls being celebrated, even after they were repeatedly flagged as catastrophes waiting to happen.

Voices Ignored: The Whistleblowers’ Story

David Lochridge and the Report No One Wanted

If there’s a central moral axis in Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, it’s David Lochridge. Former Director of Marine Operations. Not a dramatist. Not a disgruntled ex-employee. Just someone who knew what hull integrity should look like—and what it didn’t.

The film traces Lochridge’s timeline with sharp precision. In 2018, he submitted a comprehensive internal report that detailed, in technical terms, exactly what could go wrong. That report was ignored. Then he was fired. Simple as that. The documentary doesn’t editorialize it. It doesn’t need to.

What stands out is the contrast between the meticulous warnings and the corporate response, which was, essentially: “Thanks, but we’re going to keep doing it our way.” The whistleblower’s testimony about OceanGate isn’t just a subplot—it’s the smoking gun in plain view.

A Culture of Deflection Over Correction

Lochridge wasn’t the only one. The film pulls in multiple voices—engineers, technicians, former collaborators—who all waved the red flag long before Titan hit the water for its final descent. They’re not angry. They’re exhausted. And their warnings issued before the disaster aren’t presented as hindsight. They were real-time, specific, and actionable.

The documentary presents internal emails, leaked memos, and video calls that show exactly how OceanGate responded: legally, not structurally. Instead of fixing the problems, the company focused on minimizing liability and managing optics. The safety report became a corporate inconvenience, not a call to action.

This entire section is where the film’s restraint is most damning. It doesn’t scream. It just lays out David Lochridge’s safety warning about OceanGate as a case study in institutional arrogance—a clear, well-documented warning that went nowhere, while the countdown to implosion kept ticking.

Headline Hunger: Media Spectacle and Rescue Hierarchies

Five Billionaires, Four Days, and a Saturated Feed

When news broke that a private sub had gone missing near the Titanic wreck, the global media machine revved up like it had just discovered a new season of Succession. The coverage was relentless. Every ping from the North Atlantic got more airtime than most international conflicts. But Titan: The OceanGate Disaster doesn’t just document the press response—it quietly questions it.

The documentary juxtaposes wall-to-wall headlines about the passengers aboard Titan with near-total silence on a capsized migrant boat that killed hundreds the very same week. That’s not subtext. It’s plain sight. The contrast between media obsession and media omission becomes the film’s sharpest point of cultural criticism.

And no, the movie doesn’t throw around slogans or pound the podium. It simply asks: why does one crisis trigger a full-scale international rescue operation, while another barely cracks the news cycle? How the media responded becomes part of the narrative—a mirror reflecting who gets saved, who gets mourned, and who gets ignored.

Spectacle Economics and Moral Triage

This isn’t a screed about media bias. It’s a study in visibility. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster shows how disasters involving the ultra-wealthy get framed as existential dramas, while other tragedies stay footnoted. The sub wasn’t just expensive—it was narrative-ready. Five rich men chasing the Titanic in a DIY vessel? That writes itself.

The film doesn’t accuse. It observes. It looks at disaster coverage as a marketplace, where compelling visuals and familiar names make the cut. What it exposes is a kind of unspoken hierarchy, one that’s best captured in the stark contrast between how media covered Titan versus the migrant crisis—an ugly, undeniable ledger of who gets the world’s attention and who disappears without it.

Grief Without Gimmicks: Families and Private Fallout

Grief on film often walks a fine line between empathy and exploitation. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster chooses silence over spectacle. There are no sobbing family montages, no manipulated piano scores. When the film deals with loss, it does so with minimalism—and that’s exactly why it works.

The documentary features a handful of family members and colleagues, but avoids turning them into case studies or emotional props. Instead, it gives them space, letting their words land without cinematic overstatement. The film’s handling of grief avoids sentimentality in favor of quiet dignity, which is rare in true-crime-adjacent fare.

What elevates this approach is how it refuses to flatten complex individuals into caricatures. These weren’t just victims of a failed sub—they were fathers, sons, mentors. And this documentary doesn’t ask for our tears. It asks for our attention.

Resisting the True-Crime Template

Where a lesser film might have leaned into courtroom theatrics or behind-the-scenes drama, this one keeps its focus tight. It avoids framing grief as content, which is a relief in a media landscape that usually does the opposite. There’s no attempt to over-construct a villain/victim binary. The human loss is allowed to remain just that—human.

The result is a film that earns its ethical points without announcing them. It handles tragedy with a kind of journalistic integrity that’s been all but abandoned in modern documentary production. That makes how the documentary portrays those who died on Titan feel more honest than polished—and more powerful for it.

This is not a eulogy dressed up as a Netflix special. It’s an ethical documentary that treats the dead like people, not plot devices.

One Millisecond: The Physics and Cinematics of Instant Oblivion

Let’s get this straight: the Titan didn’t sink. It vanished. One millisecond. That’s how long it took for the sub’s pressure hull to collapse in on itself under 6,000 PSI. It’s a moment so fast the human brain couldn’t register it—so how do you depict that in film?

Titan: The OceanGate Disaster opts for restraint over dramatics. It doesn’t show a Hollywood-style explosion. Instead, it walks viewers through the science. Using expert breakdowns and forensic diagrams, it explains the physics of Titan’s implosion without sensationalism.

The visual treatment of the implosion is chilling because it’s clinical. There’s no slow build. No artificial tension. Just a matter-of-fact description of what pressure does when it wins. The cinematic depiction is all the more effective because it doesn’t pretend there was a chance.

When the Ocean Doesn’t Wait

What the film makes painfully clear is that there was no dramatic final moment. No cries for help. No time to react. The implosion didn’t give the passengers a warning—it gave them oblivion. And the pressure hull collapse isn’t treated like an accident. It’s treated like the logical endpoint of every decision that came before it.

This section serves a critical role in the film’s structure. It offers finality without emotional manipulation. Instead of tears, it gives us facts. And the facts are staggering. The film lets the science speak, and in doing so, it provides the most harrowing moment in the runtime.

This is how the film visualizes Titan’s destruction through the cold lens of physics, not pathos. And somehow, that makes it harder to shake.

Inside OceanGate: Culture and Consequences

Disruption on the Ocean Floor: Startup Mentality, Untested

At OceanGate, innovation wasn’t just a mission—it was a mood board. The company styled itself less like a marine engineering firm and more like a TED Talk startup incubator with deep-sea ambitions. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster gets under the hood of this aesthetic: the messianic tone, the whiteboard bravado, and the boardroom confidence that treated best practices like outdated software.

This wasn’t the aerospace playbook. It was the Silicon Valley one—built on speed, not scrutiny. The film exposes a leadership culture that worshipped disruption as gospel. The startup culture celebrated agility, not accuracy. Fail fast, iterate faster. That’s a decent strategy for an app launch. For a submersible diving 3,800 meters? Not so much.

The real tension here isn’t between innovation and failure. It’s between myth and math. The film details how OceanGate’s corporate negligence stemmed less from villainy and more from a naïve belief that the ocean could be approached with the same ethos as a product demo.

When Branding Replaces Caution

The documentary gives us more than just management jargon—it hands us receipts. Memos, pitch decks, and recorded calls all underscore how the leadership valued visibility over verification. One scene quotes a staffer describing internal decision-making as “high on ideas, low on engineering.” That about sums it up.

This section of the film doesn’t accuse. It dissects. What emerges is a clash between performative vision and real-world limitations—between a fantasy of frontier tech and the fact that water pressure doesn’t care about ambition. That’s the heart of the tension between innovation and safety at OceanGate: a team so committed to their narrative, they forgot to verify the premise.

Rulebook? What Rulebook? OceanGate’s Regulatory Story

Certification Is for Cowards?

OceanGate’s decision to avoid classing Titan with a certified body wasn’t a clerical oversight—it was deliberate. And Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is very clear about that. The documentary pulls together quotes from Stockton Rush himself, boasting that submersible certification processes were a drag on creativity. In his words, “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation takes too long.”

Here’s the thing: certification exists precisely because physics doesn’t take meetings. The film outlines a string of submersible safety regulations that were sidestepped, argued with, or outright dismissed. Classification societies like DNV-GL and ABS were never involved. Why? Because, as the film illustrates, OceanGate saw safety oversight as antithetical to speed.

This wasn’t a gray area. It was a bright red line, and the film shows how the company gleefully crossed it. Rush’s anti-regulation mindset wasn’t just a quirk—it was company policy.

Dodging Accountability by Design

The documentary doesn’t just throw quotes on screen—it builds a pattern. Interviewees recount conversations where concerns were brushed off as “old thinking.” Internal docs reveal the legal gymnastics used to justify unorthodox testing methods. And archived presentations show a relentless push to position OceanGate as a tech leader—while sidestepping the infrastructure of safety entirely.

This wasn’t chaos. It was philosophy. The film places OceanGate in a long line of companies that equate regulation with limitation. Except in this case, skipping steps meant skipping survival. OceanGate’s history of regulatory evasion isn’t a subplot. It’s the unspoken villain of the story.

The Wreckage of Belief: Operational Failure as Postmortem

Startup Spirit, Postmortem Silence

After the implosion, the tone inside OceanGate didn’t shift. It evaporated. The documentary leans into this vacuum—employee silence, social media shutdowns, scrubbed web pages. What’s left is a trail of people suddenly forced to recontextualize every decision they made for a company that promised it was changing the world.

The film uses employee interviews and internal footage to trace how belief—once infectious—curdled into disbelief. Former staff speak candidly (some off-camera, some anonymized) about the moments they started questioning decisions. Not in hindsight, but before the disaster. That’s where the real damage lives: in ignored instincts.

This isn’t a takedown. It’s an elegy for competence lost in a cloud of branded confidence. The documentary charts corporate culture failure not as drama, but as drift—a slow erosion of rigor disguised as innovation.

Culture Doesn’t Scale at Depth

The documentary avoids blame games. It focuses on systems, not scapegoats. Interviews reveal how internal practices shifted from experimental to erratic. Processes that began as temporary workarounds became institutionalized. And by the time concerns escalated, the structure for responding had already rotted out.

The internal practices weren’t overtly reckless. They were just built on soft foundations: untested materials, nonstandard protocols, managerial groupthink. It’s the kind of organizational entropy that doesn’t look like failure—until something collapses under pressure.

This isn’t just a story of one company’s collapse. It’s a case study in how a belief system can harden into policy, and how policy, when built on ego and expedience, leads straight to disaster. The post-disaster analysis of OceanGate’s startup culture doesn’t offer neat answers. It offers a chilling equation: unchecked confidence plus ignored warnings equals silence at the bottom of the sea.

Making the Documentary: Ethics, Evidence, and Storytelling

Walking the Tightrope: Mark Monroe’s Directorial Choices

Let’s be honest—true-crime-style docs have turned tragedy into a cottage industry. If this story had landed in the hands of a less capable director, Titan: The OceanGate Disaster could’ve easily devolved into disaster porn for streaming algorithms. But it didn’t. Why? Because Mark Monroe doesn’t flinch and doesn’t indulge.

This isn’t Monroe’s first dive into high-stakes terrain. The man has The Cove, Icarus, and The Dissident on his resume. He knows how to handle combustible material. What makes this Mark Monroe documentary land differently is its refusal to sensationalize. There are no artificially slowed-down montages, no mournful cello padding every scene. The tone is cool, steady, and grimly articulate.

The direction favors clean chronology over emotional manipulation. Monroe lets the facts carry the tension. His style lives in implication rather than spectacle, a rare move in a genre that usually spoon-feeds outrage. That’s where his documentary ethics show up—not in platitudes, but in editorial discipline.

Journalism with a Pulse

This film never positions itself as neutral, but it stays accountable. Monroe’s decisions reflect a balancing act—between emotional gravity and factual rigor. The documentary delivers critique without editorializing, analysis without posturing. He trusts the viewer to connect dots, and frankly, it’s refreshing.

What separates this work from other crisis docs is that the outrage isn’t telegraphed—it’s earned. Monroe avoids cheap shots, doesn’t chase villain caricatures, and doesn’t milk tears. Instead, he builds a narrative that feels closer to a case study of Monroe’s ethical approach to the Titan story than a Netflix clickbait trap.

The result is a documentary that knows its subject is tragic, but treats that as a responsibility—not an aesthetic opportunity.

Industry Muscle: Story Syndicate’s Influence and Access

The Backroom Infrastructure Behind the Screen

Good intentions don’t make good films—resources do. And Titan: The OceanGate Disaster had plenty. Story Syndicate isn’t a fringe outfit. This is the same production company behind Take Care of Maya, Britney vs Spears, and a handful of award-season fixtures. Their DNA is all over this project.

The film’s clean execution owes a lot to Story Syndicate’s industry leverage. Access to hard-to-find records, connections to legal sources, cooperation from key whistleblowers—all of that comes from institutional pull. It’s rare for investigative Story Syndicate documentaries to feel this thorough without crossing into dry procedural territory.

Here, the production backbone does more than support—it shapes. Netflix gave them the platform, but it’s Story Syndicate’s editorial instincts that keep the whole thing grounded. Their legal access wasn’t just permission to publish—it was protection to go deeper.

Why Scope Matters

This isn’t a scrappy doc with grainy clips and bootleg interviews. It’s a polished, expansive operation that understands how to pace tension without overplaying it. The film’s breadth—engineering breakdowns, corporate files, family commentary, government hearing excerpts—doesn’t happen without infrastructure.

That’s what makes Story Syndicate’s production of the OceanGate documentary distinctive. It takes resources to move this surgically through legal minefields and still land every punch. There’s editorial bravery here, sure. But there’s also institutional scaffolding. That’s the difference between a film that gets seen and one that gets buried.

Beyond the Surface: Exclusive Footage as Narrative Engine

When Receipts Replace Speculation

Let’s talk receipts. The core of this documentary isn’t speculation or punditry—it’s tape. Real audio. Internal memos. Firsthand footage from inside OceanGate’s operations. That level of access shifts this film from commentary into documentation.

The use of audio recordings isn’t theatrical. It’s tactical. Conversations aren’t weaponized for drama—they’re context. The film lays them in carefully, using them to stitch together a timeline that would otherwise rely on interpretation. That’s where it earns its authority.

And the documentary footage—unedited clips from inside Titan’s prep operations, internal pitch meetings, even casual remarks made by Rush—serves as its own indictment. The footage doesn’t scream. It quietly implicates.

Building a Case, Not Just a Mood

Plenty of documentaries wave around “exclusive access” as a branding tool. This one actually uses it as structure. The editing team integrates interviews with archived content in a way that builds momentum, not redundancy. Testimony leads into footage. Footage verifies what’s claimed. And by the time the implosion hits, there’s no room for doubt.

The real narrative engine isn’t pacing—it’s evidence. And the exclusive evidence used here doesn’t aim for viral clips. It aims for credibility. That’s what separates this film from conspiracy-fueled disaster fare. It doesn’t ask for belief. It lays out proof.

In that way, the entire production becomes a case file. Not an obituary, not an opinion piece—the documentary’s analysis of OceanGate’s internal materials, presented cleanly, factually, and without adornment. The restraint makes it hit harder.

Titan: The OceanGate Disaster Review

Review by Leon Krizman

8/10

Final Verdict

Titan: The OceanGate Disaster does what too few documentaries about tragedy manage: it resists the urge to either glorify or sensationalize. The film handles an inherently absurd and horrifying event with an editorial tone that’s sharp, dry, and—crucially—measured. It gives the audience just enough visual drama to feel the scale of the catastrophe without indulging in spectacle for its own sake. That restraint is a strength, especially when paired with the depth of research and access the filmmakers clearly had.

What works best is its structural clarity. The documentary threads together business failure, personal ambition, and technological hubris into a tightly woven narrative that never loses focus. The timeline is crisp. The expert interviews are pointed. And the exclusive footage doesn’t feel like clickbait—it’s contextualized, well-edited, and actually informative.

Its shortcomings are mostly stylistic rather than substantive. Some viewers might find the pacing a little too linear or the presentation a bit visually flat. The film doesn’t reinvent the form or push the boundaries of documentary storytelling the way something like O.J.: Made in America or The Rescue did. And for all its ethical discipline, there are moments where it hesitates to interrogate the public’s complicity in turning a slow-motion disaster into a media circus.

Still, for a film tasked with unpacking a submarine implosion that became global clickbait, it manages to walk the ethical tightrope with surprising grace. It’s smart, sobering, and refreshingly unwilling to let anyone—tech bros, media outlets, or the audience—off the hook.

Where to Watch

NETFLIX

Release date: June 11, 2025.

Premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 6, 2025

Genres: Documentary

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