While watching Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, I was reminded of a far superior documentary by Werner Herzog called Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of that film, believed he had a special connection with wild grizzly bears, despite having no formal expertise in the field, falling victim to their own delusional recklessness.
In Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, the focus is on a man who believed he could innovate around laws and deep-sea engineering standards—a kind of snake oil salesman cloaked in charisma, selling brilliance through smoke, mirrors, and the lure of adventure. It’s easier to captivate people when you’re seen as a rebel who operates outside traditional systems.
That’s how legends are born or how tragedies become a sobering reality. That’s the story behind the disaster. A tale of blind idealism, the power of charisma and persuasion, and marketing over expertise wins every time, despite regulations that should never have been thrown into the deep blue sea.
Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster Review and Synopsis
The disaster of OceanGate was a tragedy, where even legendary filmmaker and deep enthusiast James Cameron was highly critical, after the fact, mind you. His interview on CNN outlines many people’s incredulity over the situation, yet no one spoke up enough to prevent the event from happening.
However, many in-depth interviews reveal troubling information—insights that Cameron echoed early on, pointing to the fundamentally flawed science promoted by OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. The ambitious scientist-turned-businessman ignored established safety protocols in favor of expediency and cost-cutting, most notably using a carbon-fiber hull to reduce expenses.
It’s a stunning view of money influencing ambition and common sense. It is polite to say Stockton was looking for fame from innovation over safety, ignoring rigorous standards. One former employee notes that Rush ran test dives with the Titan submersible with people inside instead of unmanned trips.
Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is a Jaw-Dropping Tale
Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster marks Mark Monroe’s first directorial feature, following his work on acclaimed documentaries like The Cove, Icarus, The Dissident, Lucy and Desi, The Beach Boys, and Jim Henson: Idea Man. His debut is a jaw-dropping account of the dangerous mix of ambition, arrogance, and incompetence.
While the investigation is still ongoing and no official conclusions have been released to the public, the damning interviews are shocking in how clearly they illustrate what Stockton Rush managed to get away with. Rush earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University, yet many of the experts interviewed in the film questioned his actual expertise in the field.
Ironically, what Rush truly excelled at was finding cracks in the system. For example, OceanGate’s support vessel, the Polar Prince, was registered in Canada, while the Titan submersible was neither registered nor certified by any recognized maritime authority. The film offers an eye-opening look at a man more skilled in exploiting legal loopholes than advancing science—a would-be visionary whose ambitions far outpaced his grasp.
Is Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster Worth Watching?
Despite the straightforward approach, Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is worth watching. This is understandable, with Monreo helming his first narrative film. Even though most are known and well documented in news articles and television news magazines, the revelations are still shocking.
This is most notable when hearing stories about the sheer hubris of the man running the company. Matched only by disregarding his own staff’s repeated and documented warnings, a fatal combination for everyone onboard the fatal mission.
While I wish the film had taken a more intimate look at the four people who perished alongside Rush, its central theme focuses on a charismatic incompetent—someone whose blind ambition bullied those around him into silence or lured them in with magnetic promises of adventure.
Titan: The OceanGate Disaster streams on Netflix beginning June 11.
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