Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea

Yeah, I do documentaries. I actually LOVE crime and mystery docs, so please give me all your suggestions, and we can yap about them together. This one is different because it’s not about a murder. It’s about a cruise shipwreck. I’ll start by saying, I’ve been on a cruise once and I’m never going back. If I’m ever on a boat, it is against my will. This documentary sealed that decision. Nothing good happens in the middle of the ocean unless you’re a whale, shark, or octopus, and even then, you’re not completely safe.

The craziest part is how the captain is in a panic but they’re telling the passengers everything is ok. Even trying to get the crew members to act like everything is fine. Like telling the kitchen staff to prepare for dinner service or telling the dancer to go entertain guests. Sir/Ma’am, this is not the Titanic! I would not be playing as the ship goes down. You would need to wrestle me off the lifeboat. I get it, you have to keep the passengers from losing their minds and making things worse. But I would think rather than lying to staff and crew, let’s start slowly evacuating people before it becomes a race for the boats.

Of course, once passengers start seeing staff wearing life vests, things finally click, and they realize the ship is going down. Even after loading into the lifeboats, it took 70 minutes before they got the boats into the water so they could start getting people to shore. This whole thing is a mess. The captain had snuck off onto a boat, the crew’s swimming training was floating in the water with a vest on for a minute— what’s happening?! And why are there never enough lifeboats for everyone? Also, I’m thinking they were super far from shore. You can see them from the shore! Why are they not making rounds to get more people?

The captain absolutely deserved jail time. More of it. Yes, I agree with the language-barrier argument, and one of the crew members already told us the training was a joke, but you’re the captain. It’s the captain’s job to ensure the safety of all the crew members and passengers. They probably would’ve never taken him to court had he stayed behind and tried to get everyone off. Instead, the coward jumped ship. In my opinion, the 16 years and the fines are not enough. Too many lives were lost, people were injured, and even traumatized.

Now, here’s the thing about this documentary as a whole. The purpose of a documentary is to inform people about an event that took place and it usually captures information that was not public at the time. This didn’t do that, or at least it barely did that. I feel like I left with more questions than I started. I had vaguely heard about the shipwreck but not the inner details, which is what I was hoping for by watching this. Instead, I got almost a general rundown of things I already knew or could imagine and some cool footage from survivors.

I want to know when and how the captain bailed on the ship, the attempts to fix the issue by the engineering team, and I want to hear more conversations between crew members, the captain, and (I forgot the name of the group) the people ordering the captain back on the ship. I now want to know what the cause of death was for the mother who didn’t make it on the lifeboat. Was she one of the people who got on the boat but had to get off after the malfunction? Was she on the boat and fell off? What happened to the crew member’s life savings that was stashed in his cabin? Did the cruise reimburse him or was he able to recover it? I was wondering where the baby was all the way until the end when they finally showed pictures of the kid grown up.

This documentary could really benefit from a part 2 rather than cramming everything into an hour and 30 minutes. The first part can focus on the raw footage of the passenger’s experience and what they went through, while the second part could focus on the captain’s trial and the deeper details of what happened to cause this breakdown.

If you watched Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea, what do you think about the documentary? How did you feel about the captain’s actions and how the incident was handled? Does this sway you from going on a cruise? Let me know and we can chat about it in the comments.

As usual, don’t rely on my ratings and go experience it for yourself. I’m not a serious critic, and these are just opinions (with ratings). I’m just doing it for the love of the game.