TITAN: THE OCEANGATE SUBMERSIBLE DISASTER (2025)

By the time we reach the end of TITAN, to see what the audience is waiting for... the death of the five passengers including infamous Stockton Rush... the documentary is over, which is very strange... It's not that it seemed too short, because it's a good-enough runtime and definitely holds your attention... but there must have been lawsuits pending concerning the families of the people who died. With the exception of the daughter of Mr. Titanic (the one ringer on board who knows about the fateful ship, and who was used to legitimize things)... Instead, TITAN deals with the many, many, many mistakes/misjudgements leading up to the tragedy: so that way they attempt to explain the ending with all the problems of the past... which is somewhat interesting but ultimately a cop-out... 

Also, there has never been a scarier, more formidable noise than what the submarine was making as it went further underwater... It was like Satan using a pick-axe on someone's nerve-endings... The fact that Oceangate founder/CEO Stockton Rush was able to con all these people into taking such risks is like some kind of unexplainable cult... But even THAT aspect could have been delved into further: not necessarily the good/positive aspects of Rush, but the confidence he must have had that allowed the people to be conned in the first place (from workers to investors), and for so long: It must have been more than money that brainwashed these people... many of them scientists... Instead he's a kind of nerdy impatient scientist instead of the mad scientist they're building-up... whenever he's interviewed it's a bit of a let-down... Meanwhile, since the frame-story involves his former employees in court while delving into all the near-implosions and endless testing of the submersible, what could have been totally suspense-filled, isn't... Except the scenes with actual footage of being underwater with Rush and his cohorts... from another famous wreck to The Bahamas... which has aspects of watching an underwater thriller, like The Abyss...Speaking of, there should have been (more) footage of James Cameron (or perhaps interviews with him) because he was warning people before and after the tragedy, and is far more interesting than anyone interviewed here: he'd have made a perfect Van Helsing to Rush's bloodsucking murderer... And it's very annoying and anti-climactic ending on the second-to-last run with the obnoxious "influencer" who resembles a superhero's boxer shorts... too much 11th hour time's spent on him and his fake crying-for-the-camera... So when things sum up, they literally... sum up, and quickly... Probably because everything in this case is still in red-tape limbo... perhaps Netflix should have waited a few years to make this documentary... which means, they too, like Stockton Rush, basically jumped the gun on a creation that just wasn't ready.  Rating: ***

FORD VS FERRARI (2019)

At one point in FORD VS FERRARI, at about the beginning of act three, or perhaps the end of act two, when Christian Bale wins an important race, the people who he works for are... angry that he won... So here's a feel-good underdog sport film where winning is somehow rebellious... and Bale, as usual, deep-diving into the kind of old-school neurotic character-role that used to vanish into the background, steals the show...

But unlike THE FIGHTER, it's because the other players... including Matt Damon as the man who hired him to help Ford beat Ferrari at race car driving... doesn't have much to do but spout the kind of pump-you-up cliches that fathers bring their sons to movies for (that Tommy Lee Jones could pull off sleepwalking)... And for that, for pure mainstream popcorn entertainment, this is a fun ride, and simple to grasp... but the characters are either too roguishly-endearing or one-dimensional-greedy for the plot to really work since there's never anything to anticipate, or to be completely surprised about... Meanwhile, as otherwise intense actors, Damon and Bale are doing a general-admission imitation to please the kind of Middle-American/opening-night audience they'd personally detest, and would be better suited to a story with more edge and ambiguity (though the cookie-cutter anti-corporate spin would remain the same)...  So most likely, somewhere along the way, director James Mangold decided that jovial adrenaline was better acquired without too many distractions, which has made for a beloved, popular film... But if you go back and re-watch ROCKY, HOSSIERS or THE RIGHT STUFF, you'll learn how this sort of against-the-odds vehicle can work without trying so hard to always WORK FOR the audience instead of genuinely CHALLENGING them. Rating: ***