Who doesn't like to see stuff about the most famous shipwreck of all time? I know that I do and in the past I couldn't get enough of it. Well I think that after watching this I can officially say that my Titanic cup is full because I kept checking the time to see how long before it was going to be over.
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National Geographic doesn't mess around, that much is for sure. The tech behind how this was possible was pretty amazing as some super-state-of-the-art submersibles were sent down to the wreck site and compiled thousands of pics, hours upon hours of video and all other sorts of digital records of the wreck for the first time in history. New information about things that were only speculated about were attempted to be clarified using this data, and there are a few new theories that emerge.
A lot of this is really cool such as seeing exactly where the damage was from the impact and also accurate physics models that they show of what would have happened if they had hit the iceberg head on and how the ship wouldn't have sunk if that had happened. This is all really interesting. Unfortunately, this show is plagued by a seriously repetitive nature because the production was clearly designed to be aired on network TV. Therefore, every 11 minutes or so you are given a recap of stuff you watched just a little while ago. It gets really irritating and I wish they had made two versions of this.
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Another aspect of it that gets to be super lame after just about 20 minutes or so is the three experts that they have narrating the show. The discoveries of the submersibles is meant to be presented to the 3 for the first time in magnificent huge glory on a massive sound stage with massive LED projectors that they can literally step into. This is all really wild until you start to get the feeling that these three people are reading a script. Their reactions to things are just too wooden to appear as if it is anyone's genuine reaction and after a while it becomes obvious that they are reading a script. If you want to have a script then have a script, but don't attempt to dupe us with 3 actors that don't really know how to act. After that became evident I just wanted all three of them to go away and would have preferred just having a narrator that we never see.
Anyway, my personal bias aside the visuals on this is pretty damn cool and the mathematical stuff that they show on screen where they put together the various pieces of the ship that are now 12,000 feet below the surface back together again, is something that would have been inconceivable just 10 years ago, let alone over 100 years ago when the ship sank.
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I don't know about you but I consider massive sinking ships to be one of the most spooky things in the world so when they recreate what happened, and how terrifying it must have been to witness it, they did a very good job of that. It's just a shame that they have to tell it to you 12 times because of the "made for TV" nature of this documentary.
They do dig into a lot of new theories, such as the state of the various boiler rooms and how even though the ship was doomed, certain engineers most likely stayed behind knowing damn well that they were not going to survive, in order to keep the electricity running on the ship for as long as possible.
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While they can't say for certain, there is a bunch of evidence such as the fact that we kind of know with some level of accuracy exactly when the ship went down, and we also know when the last messages were sent out; messages that would not be possible to send out if there was no electricity flowing.
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They dig into the history and bravery of the various staff of the ship and for me and I think most people this was just adding to the information that I had previously gotten from James Cameron's epic film, "Titanic." Which I believe to be one of the greatest films of all time despite Leonardo's best efforts to fuck it up.
That trailer is so bad that it makes me angry. Honestly, this had the opportunity to be something truly amazing and it was little things like the direction and the dialogue by the 3 mostly insufferable actors / experts that ruin a lot of this. It is still a pretty special documentary but honestly, they made some crucial errors as far as presentation is concerned. If you can manage to deal with the repetitive nature of the made-for-TV presentation and the horrible "not scripted" performance by the experts, there is some pretty fantastic visuals in this story.
For me, I am on the fence about if it is worth all the frustration just to get to the good stuff. So therefore I am going to give this a
you can legally stream this on Disney+ and Hulu