TITAN: THE OCEANGATE DISASTER (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
Stockton Rush, the late CEO of the commercial underwater company OceanGate, wanted to be the next Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, so much that he used the phrase “big swinging dicks” all the time, an employee notes.
Rush’s envy and arrogance powers the documentary Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, a film maddening both for what it reveals but also for what it doesn’t explore.
Streaming on Netflix, the film takes a look at the June 2023 implosion of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber submersible Titan, killing Rush and four passengers on board. The vessel made worldwide headlines after it went silent nearly two hours into its dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, triggering a search that lasted for days.
The film, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, lays out more than enough evidence that this was a disaster waiting to happen. Yet frankly, anyone who watched journalist David Pogue’s CBS Sunday Morning segment about his own dive aboard Titan in previous years suspected that.
In Pogue’s report—a disturbing companion piece to this film—Rush bragged about steering the submersible with a Sony PlayStation controller while wealthy tourists oohed and aahed at the Titanic’s wreckage and snapped photos. I watched this on YouTube in the wake of the implosion and wondered how Pogue must have felt having made it back alive.
Pogue appears here, as does Wired journalist Mark Harris, their comments and those of others who came aboard Titan adding a haunting touch. YouTuber Jake Koehler, who was sealed inside the vessel for a dive before weather scrapped that trip, breaks down on camera, recalling how his feet felt cold resting against the dome he later saw in news reports on the ocean floor.
Where Titan: The OceanGate Disaster falls short is where it places the blame—and there’s plenty to go around.
Primetime Emmy-winning director Mark Monroe (Jim Henson: Idea Man) builds decent suspense around this doomed endeavor through footage aboard the craft on previous dives, interviews with former employees and experts, and eerie sound design. Titan had an “audible warning system” that broadcast pops and creaks in the hull, including during a trip to the wreckage of the Andrea Doria where Rush foolishly jammed the craft under the bow. Submersible pilot and whistleblower David Lochridge maneuvered it back to the surface.
Carbon fibers aren’t as strong as steel or titanium, something Rush refused to accept. For years, he’d been fascinated by the Titanic and the idea of ferrying observers to the wreckage at hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. A steel or titanium vessel large enough to hold five people for the appropriate depth would be much too expensive and unwieldy to transport to the launch site.
Rush seemed to crow every time Titan returned after trips full of these snapping sounds, chalking them up to “seasoning the hull.” But he was gambling with his and his passengers’ lives. He fired Lochridge, who wrote a detailed memo about the vessel’s safety, insisting on audio, “I know what the hell I’m doing.”
There’s no question a carbon fiber hull would fail, one expert notes—and OceanGate had a couple that did before Titan’s last voyage.
Aside from Sidonie Nargeolet, the daughter of renowned deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert P. H. Nargeolet, who died in the implosion, the film has no interviews with the passengers’ families. That includes Wendy Rush, Rush’s wife, who in archive footage monitors his dives from the surface, whooping at successes.
Also conspicuously absent is anyone from OceanGate’s board of directors. To be fair, the Washington State company has suspended all operations, and it might have declined to participate. At the time the film wrapped, the US Coast Guard Marine Investigators, among other authorities, were still completing inquiries into what happened.
As a result, the deceased Stockton Rush becomes the lone scapegoat, but the culture that enabled him escapes. There are scraps of a broader statement below the surface here about tech-bro hubris and the complicit or intimidated mindset that does nothing to stop it. Viewers will have to discover that on their own.
