Implosion The Titanic Sub Disaster: Doc Lays Bare How Hubris Sunk Bold Aquatic Expedition

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A

It may be bad form to speak ill of the dead. But watching the new documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, it’s impossible not to call out the late Stockton Rush as a breathtakingly arrogant jerk fueled by hubris.

Stockton Rush sitting atop Titan.

Rush was the co-founder and CEO of OceanGate, a deep-sea exploration company that operated the ill-fated submersible Titan. In June 2023, Rush along with French-born Titanic expert P.H. Nargeolet and three paying customers were bolted inside the mini-sub Rush’s company engineered and plunged 3,800 meters to the site of the famed shipwreck.

When they failed to come back, the world was gripped as news media followed a frantic search to rescue the presumed still-alive quintet before the air in their vessel ran out. But submersible specialists around the world, several interviewed in the documentary, were not holding their breath for successful recovery of the passengers.

For years, it had been widely known in deep-sea exploration circles that the Titan — constructed of carbon fiber and not titanium, the industry standard — was unlikely to withstand the pressure, some 6,000 pounds per square inch, of those depths.

Rush’s own scientists and engineers had repeatedly warned of as much, and previous tests aboard prototypes had revealed major flaws in the OceanGate submersible design.

But Rush, convinced of his own singular genius and swashbuckling daring, would have none of it. He paid the ultimate price for that egotism, as did four others who were fished out of the North Atlantic in pieces. Not great optics for further sea exploration and conservation.

As author and ocean journalist Susan Casey wrote in Vanity Fair after the accident, “Before the Titan’s last descent, there hadn’t been a fatal accident in a human-occupied submersible for nearly 50 years—despite a 2,000 percent increase in the annual number of dives in that period.

“In the 93-year history of manned deep-sea exploration, no submersible had ever imploded. ‘Ultimately it comes down to not just technology,’ marine engineer Will Kohnen is quoted as saying, ‘but the rigor of the nerdy, detailed engineering that goes behind it, to determine that things are predictable.’”

Casey, whose excellent 2024 book The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean partly chronicled the disaster, goes on to quote Jarl Stromer, an industry veteran and the manager of class and regulatory compliance for Triton Submarines. Was there any possible reason the Titan could have imploded other than its design and construction were unsuitable for diving to 4,000 meters?

“No. OceanGate bears full responsibility for the design, fabrication, testing, inspection, operation, maintenance, catastrophic failure of the Titan submersible and the deaths of all five people on board.”

Similarly alarming statements propel frame after frame of British director Pamela Gordon’s documentary, co-commissioned by BBC, CBC, and Discovery U.S. Gordon interviews experts and, heartbreakingly, Christine Dawood, whose husband Shahzada Dawood, 48, and 19-year-old son Suleman died aboard the Titan alongside Rush, Nargeolet, and British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding. Images of the devastated recovered wreckage makes it clear those aboard mercifully didn’t suffer for long.

The filmmakers also had unprecedented access to the U.S. Coast Guard’s marine board investigation —with its genuinely shocking details of negligence — plus never-before-seen footage of Titan’s final dive and Rush’s marketing pitches in the leadup to the disaster, characterized in the film as a “bait and switch” and which deliberately dodged standard regulatory oversight.

The film does attempt to explore Rush’s psychological makeup — what on earth would propel a rich and educated guy to ignore red flag after red flag and insist on making deep-sea dives in structurally questionable vessels?

Perhaps the most perceptive clue comes from Christine Dawood, who says Rush put “arrogance before safety,” something that, not so ironically, can also be said of those behind the Titanic that Rush and his passengers so longed to see in its watery gravesite.

It’s all very sobering stuff and the film does a good job of capturing the kaleidoscopic awesomeness-slash-weirdness of being inside a tiny, agile vessel dipped to heretofore unimaginable depths.

That’s brought very much to life by subjects like TV presenter Josh Gates who made a white-knuckle dive with Rush in 2021 for his show Expeditions Unknown, and submersible expert Karl Stanley who experienced another flawed test dive in 2019 that he later said "came very close" to killing him.

But it’s that unchecked hubris that haunts the most.

Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster. Directed by Pamela Gordon. Streaming June 6 on CBC Gem and The Nature of Things YouTube Channel; and premiering June 18 CBC's The Nature of Things.