Every week, Netflix unveils its Top 10 lists for the week before, ranking TV shows and movies by viewership. This week, Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster was the no. 2 film on Netflix’s Top 10, but the documentary about the deadly 2023 Titan submersible implosion isn’t the only film about the catastrophic undersea tragedy.
Another, Max’s Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, came out in May. Both reveal the lengths that explorer and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush went to in order to send his innovative but flawed submersible to the depths of the Titanic, but is one of these films better or more informative than the other?
Both films are compelling, and each one features key witnesses with firsthand knowledge and experience aboard the sub who offer unique perspectives, all of them claiming that the sub’s implosion was inevitable. The same points are made in both docs, but the information doesn’t feel overly repetitive. Because of that, they complement each other and offer a clearer picture of what happened when taken together. I hate to say it (for time’s sake), but if you’re invested in the topic, it’s absolutely worth watching both. But if you had to pick just one, I do have a recommendation.
Both of these Titan documentaries arrived on streaming around the second anniversary of Titan’s final, fatal dive, June 18, 2023. Both of them ultimately point to Rush being aware of the flaws and safety concerns regarding Titan, and despite the many whistleblowers around him, he chose to dismiss their concerns. (Titan had several issues, but the two biggest were its cylindrical shape, which didn’t distribute pressure evenly, and the fact that it was constructed with an experimental carbon fiber hull, a material that had not been sufficiently tested to withstand deep-sea pressure at the depths of the Titanic.) The Netflix doc, for the most part, features interviews with former OceanGate employees and points to a flawed company culture that required unwavering loyalty to Rush. As the film shows, anyone who dared to raise concerns over faulty science was eventually forced out. One employee in particular, David Lochridge, a submersible pilot and OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, is depicted as the primary whistleblower at OceanGate.
Lochridge was a high-level employee at the company who would eventually be fired for voicing his concerns about Titan’s design and was later threatened with a lawsuit by OceanGate when he tried to make his safety claims public. The documentary includes audio and video recordings of heated conversations between Lochridge and Rush, and footage of a dive to see the shipwreck the Andrea Doria, which required Lochridge to pilot the sub out of harm’s way after Rush ensnared their vessel under the shipwreck’s hull. Lochridge is just one of several former OceanGate employees on record in the film who left the company because they refused to be complicit in a potential situation that might place unsuspecting participants in harm’s way. But Lochridge’s anger at Rush — and at the Titan’s outcome — is evident. “He wanted fame,” Lochridge says of Rush at the end of the Netflix documentary. “First and foremost. To fuel his ego. Fame. That was what he wanted, and he’s got it.”
The Discovery documentary, Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, which is available on Max, features interviews with some of the same players as the Netflix doc but focuses on the US Coast Guard’s investigation into the sub’s implosion, and interviews with Josh Gates, host of Discovery’s Expedition Unknown. Gates himself has been aboard the Titan and had planned to feature the submersible in an episode of his show, but grew so concerned after the “cascade of problems” the sub experienced on his trip that he refused to air the footage he planned to produce. “It wasn’t just a red flag for me,” Gates said of Rush’s attitude toward the safety measures on board Titan, “It was like a flare had gone up.” The film also features footage not included in Netflix’s documentary of the moment that the topside ship lost communication with Titan, a haunting scene that shows Rush’s wife, Wendy, the communications director on board, asking, “What was that bang?” after losing contact with the sub.
I followed the story of Titan casually when the sub went missing in June 2023. Essentially, I believed it was all a terrible, tragic accident. But after watching both of these documentaries, it seems like the Titan’s implosion could have been prevented. The submersible was missing for four days, and in that time, the world at large held out some hope that it was simply missing, and that those on the dive would be found safe somewhere in the North Atlantic. But both films make it abundantly clear that anyone familiar with Titan knew immediately when they heard the sub was missing that it suffered the same fate as the Titanic itself.
Lochridge’s accounts of his time at OceanGate in the Netflix doc help paint Stockton Rush as a boss reluctant to admit his company’s shortcomings, and his testimony alone is stunning to see. But if I had to suggest just one of these films to watch, Max’s version, which features testimony from the Coast Guard’s inquiry, an interview with Christine Dawood, the wife and mother of two of the victims on board, and Josh Gates’ footage from his own trip on Titan, simply answers more questions about how this disaster happened and the impact it left behind. But chances are, if you watch one of them, you’ll get hooked and watch both anyway, like I did.
