Doc Watch: Titan - The Oceangate Disaster (2025)

Watched:  06/18/2025

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mark Monroe

(blogger's note:  we did also watch the other doc on this topic over on MAX)

Well.  This was horrifying.

I woke up this morning to another Space X rocket exploding on the pad.  Which is kind of normal when you're figuring out gigantic rockets (see the Atlas rocket program).  But the failure rate of Space X is starting to be a real stunner as booster after booster goes en fuego.  As is the insistence we get Tesla robot taxis on city streets when those taxis don't seem to recognize things like children in the road.

Also, I've worked for difficult people.  I have been a difficult people to work for.  What neither I, nor those people, have done is ignore and fire anyone who was coming along to warn us of catastrophe.  Especially catastrophe that would murder me 4000 meters beneath the ocean waves.

What Titan: The Oceangate Disaster (2025) manages to do is show how one ego run amok - and an absentee board, I'd argue - led directly to the death of five people for absolutely no reason.  

It's a story of a small kingdom, one with life and death stakes, where one guy's Ahab-like vision meant that employees needed an almost religious faith in a technology that clearly was not meant to do the thing it was required to do.  And our Ahab would ruin you if you crossed him.

I think in the wake of the news stories on Titan, we all had a pretty good idea that there had been signs.  What it was hard to know was how numerous, obvious and devastating the indicators of coming disaster had been and for how long.  

In simple terms, the doc lays out the case that systems we assume will be there didn't just fail, they don't exist.  

SPOILERS

What is alluded to but not shown directly is that the board of Oceangate continued to support a CEO who was regularly firing those who expressed concerns.  Somehow Stockton Rush was able to stay in place despite massive churn and turnover beneath him - that he directly caused.  More directly, we're shown OSHA treated the coming disaster as one more slip and fall that had not yet happened, and left their whistleblower open to financially devastating legal action.  Oceangate bent maritime rules, and weaponized the assumptions and ignorance of potential customers.

And it's pretty clear that if Stockton Rush, the CEO of Oceangate, had not died in the disaster, we probably would never really know what happened.  

But because he's dead, those who were silenced were willing... nay... excited to be a part of this doc.  One guy I thought was some sort of nutcase because he seemed jazzed to talk about all this, but after you see how things played out for him, yeah... I get it.  Someone is asking him after all these years of what was clearly an abusive work relationship about his dumb, dead boss.  

The most famous of those who went on the record against Oceangate, the actual former military submarine pilot who knew his business, paid for his actions with devastating lawsuits by someone with inherited wealth.  

Book keepers.  Former engineers.  Journalists.  So many people felt forced to walk away, and left it to the next person to maybe right the ship, and you can't blame them.  All you can hope is the next person will talk some sense into idiot in charge.  In the world of "you had one job", all of them were told to ignore the one job.

A belief you should be able to do something on the cheap doesn't mean you can.  That can mean the materials you choose, how you test, and how you accept that failure of your hypothesis is all you have.  And that you must accept that failure is not an option.  Not "we don't accept failure, we will launch a submarine", but in that - you will not fail the people trusting you with their lives.  Launching the thing doesn't matter at all.  Succeeding in safely returning your passengers to the ship is all that matters.

I know absolutely nothing about submarines, and I know dry docking a carbon fiber vessel in sub-zero temperatures all winter is a horrible idea.  But they did it.  And they didn't test the vehicle before putting it back in the water.  To save a buck.

I mean, jfc, this guy was using a Playstation controller to pilot a submarine.  At one point do you say "hey, this is maybe not as foolproof as I'd like for things to be at 4000 meters?"  But I also think it's of note that of those who also died in the disaster, we had essentially two billionaires who love to believe they're something special and game is recognizing maverick game.  

Titan: The Oceangate Disaster is an indictment of so much of how the world has functioned the past decade or two, of the hero businessman who has been lauded as a maverick and beyond our mere human understanding.  As if every one of these guys is really Tony Stark and not some average-brained guy born to privilege who was able to buy their way into some oddball niche.  

We don't hear about the failures, we hear about the ones who bumble-fucked their way into a fortune and squander their great resources to build personal spacecraft for what's the equivalent of taking people out on their lake boat (to their credit, Virgin has sure slowed their space program after finding issues - maybe a side effect of being in the airline business).  We're told by nodding journalists that they must know what they're doing when it's clear all they're bringing to the table is a sport coat and t-shirt and it's actual smart people doing the real work. 

The film only winks at those parallels between a Rush and a Musk, but it sure feels like it's in the atmosphere around the film from the start with the Big Swingin' Dick comment.  

As much as Titan's CEO ignored the warning signs, so, too, maybe we're ignoring the warning signs of things like the Oceangate disaster in our belief in what these maverick, supposed genius CEOs are selling, from Rush to Elizabeth Holmes to Musk to (insert whomever the press wants to cover this week).  Maybe we need to be smarter who we choose to believe in and recognize a snake oil salesperson when we see one.

But it's not like we just let one of these dipshits just take a chainsaw to the federal infrastructure.