Titan: The OceanGate Disaster starts streaming on June 11th.
Netflix
Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
It was hard to believe how ill-conceived and poorly managed OceanGate Expeditions’ plan to send its people down to the Titanic wreckage was, as reports first broke of the company’s Titan submersible suffering a catastrophic implosion. But the entire situation and driving force behind it seem so much worse in the new trailer for Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster documentary.
Produced by Story Syndicate (Britney v Spears) and directed by Mark Monroe (Jim Henson: Idea Man), Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is a both a look back at everything that went wrong with the Titan project and a deep dive into the mind of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, one of the five people who died when the submersible ultimately imploded at the bottom of the sea. In the doc’s first trailer, Rush seems to be the only person at OceanGate who refused to see the multitude of ways in which the failed expedition was going to put people’s lives in danger.
The trailer makes it seem like there was no one at the company who could convince their boss that asking an accountant to pilot an underwater vehicle or trying to hook a video game controller up to control a submersible were blatant signs of poor judgment. But these are the sorts of perils that come with working for CEOs who simply can’t fathom that they might be wrong.
Following its debut at this year’s Tribeca Festival on June 6th, Titan: The OceanGate Disaster will make its Netflix debut on June 11th.
