Watched: 06/18/2025
Format: Netflix
Viewing: First
Director: Mark Monroe
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
