Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster

Two years after the OceanGate tragedy gripped the world, HBO finally delivers a polished, official-looking documentary on the implosion that captivated headlines and imaginations. When it happened, the internet became a living archive - I couldn't stop digging, watching, reading. It was morbid, yes, but impossible to ignore. The kind of real-life disaster that lingers, then fades - until something brings it roaring back.

This documentary could've been that something.

The production is slick, the archival footage gripping - debris fields, deep-sea dives, voices from past expeditions. But the interviews don't land. Some are vague, others feel staged. You're left sensing there's more behind the eyes of the people speaking, and that the truth is hiding just off-camera. The tone leans into drama, and not in the good way. It cheapens the weight of what really happened.

There was a story here that needed telling. This version gets close - but never quite reaches the depth.

This TV documentary was rushed to compete and be released ahead of Netflix's competing product "Titan: The Oceangate Disaster". It focuses on the Coast Guard hearings crew members and lacks key Oceangate people that Netflix snatched first and locked into a contract. Some bad moments are interviewing a diversity hire person that gives no relevant information about the investigation and stock footage of an airplane doing a loop being shown to buy time. And this is in the 60 minutes version. Ouch. The only triumph of this documentary is the exclusive footage of a key moment in the tragedy (and they show it twice).

I'm a bit of a white-knuckle ride lover myself, indeed later this year I'm hoping to hook up with a chum who's promised to take me up in his two-seater gyrocopter. I can also remember walking around Tenerife harbour years ago and coming across a "yellow submarine" vessel taking passengers for brief underwater trips and wishing I'd gone on it.

Maybe not so much now after watching this chilling one-hour BBC documentary on US entrepreuner and inventor Stockton Rush's ambition to build a carbon-fibre submersible capable of exploring the depths of the oceans. His OceanGate company was set up to take anyone willing and able to cough up the $250000 to take the trip down to see at first hand the wreck of the legendary Titanic where it sank in 1912, two and a half miles below the Atlantic Ocean.

As we now know, Dive no. 88 ended tragically when the Titan vessel imploded near the bottom of the ocean instantly killing its five passengers, including Rush himself and a British father and his young son. In a programme filled with interviews, that with the wife and mother of the latter goes hardest, as she just about manages to balance her anger at Rush with her deep sorrow for her loss.

There's an ongoing official US Coastguard enquiry into the disaster, so that this mini-documentary, which has access to some of the actual witness testimony, somewhat pre-empts the outcome but I personally didn't get the impression that the events leading up to it were presented in a partial way. We get Rush's back-story, that of a clearly ambitious individual, born to wealth but determined to make his own way in the world. Like his family predecessors, it's unsurprising that he looked to bend the great seas to his will, although we do learn that his first interest was actually in space travel.

Finally, he completes the design of his prototype mini-sub but there are clear signs along the way that his checks weren't anywhere near as rigorous as such a dangerous enterprise demanded. Past colleagues and employees relate to camera and the official investigation their concerns, especially on the matter of the potentially calamitous lapidation of the carbon-fibre core, although some of these claims are disputed. The centrepiece of the programme is the actual footage of OceanGate's own video feed of the moment catastrophe struck, as we see Rush's wife reacting to the noise of the bang when the implosion occurred, heartbreakingly followed by a delayed message from the Titan vessel indicating things might be okay.

In the end this is a tale of one man's extreme hubris blinding him to his duty of care to the unfortunate individuals who put their trust in him. Yes, he too paid his own personal price in the process, but in actively marketing a place on his little ship as the "safest place on the planet", he was misguided in the extreme and inflicted lasting heartache on the surviving friends and family of those who sadly perished with him.

When I came across this documentary on my HBO Max, the nostalgia of the story of this tragic, horrific incident totally came back to me. It's scary to imagine being down in the darkest depths of the abyss, then you die, never returning to the surface...ever. The documentary does a good job of diving deep into the origins of why this "Titan" was created. It definitely unravels a lot of behind the scenes footage of what was going on when they were testing it, the plans the team were deciding on, and deep stories from several eyewitnesses. I feel like there are some places where we as humans don't belong. And places down in the ocean that go to 4,000 meters is one of them. Though exploration in the ocean can be exciting, but there really are dangers to it and there needs to be certain limits I feel like. I get it, the Titanic is still down there, but why do people need to keep going to see it? It's not going anywhere.

The documentary teaches how such audacious decisions for the need to go down that deep should sometimes be ill-advised, especially if you're not even sure your own submarine is 100% ready. It also teaches us how pride can go before fall. The ego of Stockton, the main guy, he gets led astray into his own ways of testing the Titan, thinking it's perfect, but unfortunately not coming down to the root of caring about the real concerns and problems.

All in all, if you like mysteries or stuff about the ocean perhaps, then this a must watch.

Of course I am familiar with the tragedy that befell the Titan submersible and those inside it. And thus, when I had the opportunity to watch this 2025 documentary "Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster", of course I opted to do so.

I harbored no expectations to this particular documentary, as I had in effect put the memories of this event so far away in memory that I no longer thought about it. Only by stumbling upon the documentary did my mind get reminded about the implosion and the tragedy. And of course I have my own opinions of Stockton and OceanGate.

Writer Gary Lang and director Pamela Gordon put together an insightful documentary that delt with the matter of the implosion in, what I believe to be, a neutral and objective manner. The documentary did put a lot of things out in the open that I was not aware of. But then again, I didn't really closely follow the incident back when it was on the news. I only kept up with in peripherally.

Watchable, sure. Informational, sure. The 90 minutes of this documentary were actually well-spent. Not something you watch more than once, though.

My rating of "Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster" lands on a six out of ten stars.