Mark Monroe’s “Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” is too well-sourced and researched to be confused for one of those ghoulish docs that shows up on Hulu within a week of some major American catastrophe (they range in subject from the Astroworld tragedy to the Diddy trial and the Fyre Festival), but this watchably morbid piece of Netflix content still manages to somehow feel both too soon and too late at the same time.
Of course, “too soon” is a relative term when it comes to such things these days, as the media — social and network alike — began salivating over this story well before it was even confirmed that OceanGate founder Stockton Rush and the four passengers aboard his Titan submersible four passengers had been killed when the capsule imploded as it dove towards the ruins of the Titanic on June 18, 2023. That may not sound like it was all that long ago, but the last 24 months have suffered more news cycles than several of the 24 years before them, and time has been flattened to the point where Stockton Rush and the 113-year-old shipwreck that summoned him to his death might as well belong to the same chapter of ancient history.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the OceanGate disaster is so recent — and, more importantly, so well-remembered — that Monroe’s documentary would have to go a hell of a lot deeper to justify dredging it up again for yet another look. While there’s nothing egregiously cynical about the film’s nature or design, its forensic tone belies the familiarity of its evidence, and its subject has already been too well-excavated for the sincerity of Monroe’s efforts to shake off that signature true-crime stink (the pungent stench of a once-proud medium that’s been left to rot on streaming).
Yes, it helps that Monroe frames this story as a cautionary tale about the dangers of surrendering common sense to cults of personality (not that it could be framed in any other way), and the Elon Musk of it all definitely lends the doc a topicality that helps to validate its timing. But the dramatic irony of the disaster proves too irresistible for “Titan” to pull away from it, and — cue the ominously sawing violins — what might have been a more illuminating exploration of “visionary” culture settles for rubbernecking at some rich asshole whose death has always been less remarkable for its nightmarish circumstances than for the national wave of schadenfreude that it caused.
Odds are that anyone reading this already knows everything they ever will about Stockton Rush, which “Titan” sees as permission not to plumb any deeper under the surface. Still, the clips that Monroe uses to make his case against the square-jawed CEO — who seems to have believed that his inherent greatness was the most valuable safety measure any submersible could ever hope to have onboard — are more damning than anything I remember seeing on TV around the time of the incident. “If you hear an alarm, don’t worry about it,” we hear Rush saying at the start of the film. “Best thing to do is to not do anything.” Later, Monroe includes a clip from a panel show where Rush claims that Titan’s carbon fiber hull is “pretty much invulnerable.” When the interviewer mentions that people said the same thing about the Titanic, Rush only nods and smiles. History is seldom kind to the men who condescend to it.
“Titan” predictably decides to open with footage shot just before the disaster as a teaser for the deaths to come, but rather than simply roll back in time and wend his way forward through the years from there (with a variety of talking heads on hand to share their personal experiences of working with Rush), Monroe opts for a more pincer-like structure that cuts between the creation of OceanGate and the congressional hearings that followed its collapse. That approach fails to account for the film’s disinterest in Rush’s personal life and/or the root causes of his egotism, but it does help to underscore the fated inevitability of the Titan’s implosion, which was obvious to everyone except the people who died in it.
Rush’s passengers — who were never classified as such, because that would have made OceanGate subject to more of the government regulations that its CEO so brazenly defied — mostly go unmentioned here, which is a glaring omission for a film so focused on the nuts and bolts of how charisma can seduce people out of their common sense. I suspect the decision was largely borne out of sensitivity for the innocent dead, even if the exception “Titan” makes for deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet is freighted with the implication that he should have known better (Nargeolet’s daughter Sidonie agreed to be interviewed for the film, though her testimony does more to galvanize our emotions than to explain her father’s choices).
Monroe focuses instead on OceanGate’s former employees, like operations director David Lochridge, who blew the whistle on — and was immediately fired from — Rush’s company as soon as he understood the extent of the risks involved. And “Titan” outlines those risks in queasy and exhaustive detail, especially when it comes to the carbon fiber that Rush used for the Titan hull as a cheap replacement for the industry standard steels and alloys (my stomach dropped at the part where the CEO brags about his new hires from Boeing). It’s one thing to read about what it sounded like when the fiber began to crack, but it’s another to hear that ear-splitting horror for yourself as OceanGate’s engineers test out the material. In lieu of footage from the fateful dive itself, Monroe effectively uses archival video like that to feed our imaginations, and lend a physical dimension to what it meant whenever Rush bragged that OceanGate was “doing weird shit.”
The carbon fiber hull — designed with the idea of creating a tourist-friendly, brand-forward fleet of submersibles in mind — also epitomizes the degree to which OceanGate was a direct expression of its founder. Like Steve Jobs with Apple or Musk with Tesla, Rush made himself inextricable from his company, to the point that any criticism of its product was naturally taken as a criticism of himself, and vice-versa.
To that end, the argument could be made that “Titan” — in its detailed analysis of how OceanGate morphed from a science-driven enterprise to a flashier business that fed on public wonder — reveals more about who Rush was than a more traditional biodoc ever could. But Monroe’s film is too entranced by its own drumbeat of macabre details to do much more than gawk at the reality of who Rush was under all of his capital and confidence, and to shake its head at the fact that most people couldn’t see that reality until it was too late.
While “Titan” is an undoubtedly authoritative screen account of what led to the OceanGate disaster, the story it tells is so obvious in hindsight — and its telling so content with the macabre entertainment of exploring that obviousness — that Monroe’s documentary can only get so deep into what the deaths of Stockton Rush and his victims portend for the world at large. “It’s culture that caused this to happen,” says one of the film’s talking heads. “It’s culture that killed the people.” If we understand what they mean, that’s largely because it’s threatening to kill the rest of us too.
Grade: C
“Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, June 11.
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