Mysteries from the Grave: Titanic

I learned nothing new from this documentary but it would be fairly good for people new to the subject. A major irritation for me was that a survivor's descendant could make remarks, now out of date, about the Californian and its captain without any challenge.

A minor irritation was the voice of one of the experts (who are these people anyway?) which was piercing. That could have been toned down by the technical team.

There were many pictures and film of the Olympic which I suppose is understandable.

There were inconsistencies, such as the comments that the sea was extremely calm and then the sea was shown as moderately rough.

A promising video that quickly degenerated into a preachy propaganda piece regarding race and other nonsense unrelated to the tragedy. The "experts" remarks are poorly scripted and betray.their only generalized knowledge of the "Olympic" class vessels of the White Star Line. The stock footage is also inaccurate, with many shots of the Olympic being passed off as the Titanic. It then goes on to state that the ship had 'design flaws' when viewed from the hindsight of today, when the ship was actually an overbuilt state of the art vessel in 1912. Then Edward Smith is depicted as a reckless Captain who 'ignored' ice warnings and steamed on full speed ahead. What they fail to relate is that ALL ships at the time kept as sharp a lookout as they could, and usually moved through ice fields at full speed. Smith was in fact aware of the ice warnings and altered Titanic's course further south, which in fact doomed the ship as the new course led directly to the iceberg.

As mentioned by the previous reviewer 'vampirejesus'; So called experts and various distant relatives of those on board give their opinions on what happened and how their relatives behaved etc. The continuous replays of computer generated scenes became somewhat tedious to the point of becoming totally irrelevent. The mention of a possible coal bunker fire, which whilst being quite relevent, came up as only speculation with no real proof being provided.

But what really irritated me was the machine-gun type commentary of an 'expert' by the name of Kaylee Jukich-Fish (sp) whose appallingly rapid speech became so irritating after a while that every time she came on I hit the mute button!!

A serious documentary? Definitely NOT! Infotainment only, and then at the lowest level possible.

Interest in the sinking of the Titanic has hardly dwindled over the years. This TV doc taps into this further. I daresay, if you are well versed in this subject, that this film will most likely be of limited use but if not, it will offer some bits and pieces of interesting info on the subject. Its certainly a pretty cheap production it has to be said and regularly uses bits from a real-time computer simulation which you can easily access online. Aside from this there are more interesting vintage newsreels and interior photos of the ship. It's a doc which definitely gets over the line, even if it's a bit limited in some ways. What I mainly took out of it was two episodes I knew nothing about - namely, coal bunker fire which raged for days, possibly causing damage to the ship, contributing to the later disaster and the moment that Titanic almost crashed into another ship soon after setting sail! Its stuff like this which ensures this doc is kind of interesting but its most probably going to be of more use to those with more casual knowledge of Titanic, than those will well-versed knowledge.

Of the bazillion different "Titanic" documentaries, this is not in the upper echelon--but it has good points. There are the usual appearances by family members of passengers, vintage newsreel footage, photos of the ship's interior and so forth.

It would have benefited more if, regarding a couple of its very young commentators, there were some kind of evidence that they have any real-world qualifications regarding Titanic history--one gets the impression that they just looked up "Titanic" info online after school. Others--including the passenger descendants--come across as more credible, with actual experience in documenting Titanic's history.

Still, it's decently written and put together.

The graphics are good, narration is clear and well-written, and there's more than the usual superficial mention of the coal fire that burned for a couple of days below decks. There are a number of interesting background facts regarding some passengers of note that are rarely mentioned in other documentaries. Overall, it's better than many such efforts. Give it a watch.