COLUMN | Holiday Shorts 2025, part one of two: four maritime films for your vacation and two books [Offshore Accounts]

Tonight, fireworks ring out across France to celebrate the fall of the Bastille prison in Paris, which symbolically began the French Revolution on July 14, 1789.

A cynic might consider the storming of the prison in a murderous rampage by a mob as a pointless spasm of violence, since it killed 94 people to little benefit, but, anyway, the northern hemisphere holiday season is kicking off.

Try getting Norwegian suppliers to answer a purchase request! Try getting an answer from a Dutch, French or Italian bank about financing! Or best of all, try to find a service technician from Germany or Denmark who can fly to attend a ship in a remote location at short notice. Even India, Malaysia and Singapore have long weekends for their national days in August, too.

Breathe deeply and accept that your productivity is going to be ruined. So, it is time for some recreational recommendations.

Firstly, four films with a maritime theme, featuring underwater survival, underwater exploration and underwater tragedy. Each features a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and a wide variety of support vessels, for ship spotters.

Last Breath

“Cap, the thrusters have gone offline!”

“How many?”

“All of them.”

“The ship is moving. Get out of the manifold right now.”

“We have a runoff!”

“The ship's not drifting.”

“Chris has become our anchor.”

“There is no more slack.”

“My gas supply, I can't breathe.”

“Chris… are you there?”

The dialogue above from this brilliant film, based on the 2019 documentary of the same name, summarises the remarkable and terrifying story of the North Sea saturation diver Chris Lemons, played by Finn Cole. See the trailer here.

Mr Lemons was left unconscious on the seabed when the dive support vessel (DSV) from which he was working unexpectedly lost position in 2012, whilst he and his colleagues were on a repair job around 100 metres down. In the film, the ship is called Theros; in real life, it was Bibby Topaz.

Mr Lemons’ umbilical snagged on a manifold, and then snapped, as the vessel lost station due to a dynamic positioning (DP) system failure, leaving him alone on the seabed in the pitch dark, frigid waters, running out of reserve oxygen, holding a flare.

There's a helpful countdown of his dwindling gas supplies on the screen for the audience. Spoiler alert – the reserve tank doesn't last long, and soon the counter becomes a “time without oxygen” count up, although a recent study from German diving specialists suggests that the reason Mr Lemons survived was that there was probably more oxygen available to him than initially believed.

Meanwhile, back on the surface, the DP officer is busy trying to reset the DP system with some rewiring of the spaghetti of cables in the server room (I am guessing this was the ETO in real life). The dive supervisor and the ROV pilot on the vessel then embark on a desperate mission to locate and then grab the stricken diver’s unconscious body with the pincers of the ROV.

The dialogue between the bridge officers on the DSV is a little cheesy, and nautically incorrect (steering the ship manually is apparently an operation only to be used in port, according to the script, which came as a surprise to me).

Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu star as the other members of the dive team, helplessly waiting in the dive bell and before being tasked with recovering their unresponsive colleague, whom they believe is dead, as the DSV bucks around in the storm, whiplashing the equipment above the seabed, making the retrieval a hazardous, nail-biting scene.

Last Breath is an excellent film capturing the claustrophobic confines of the diving chamber and the isolation of the sat diver’s work. It is well worth watching, even if you know the ending and even if you find some of the conversations a little simplistic – remember, it is targeted at a general audience, not at existing sat divers or DPOs. You will cry tears of joy and relief at the climax, unless you have a heart of stone.

In fact, knowing the ending in advance seems to be a prerequisite for our recommendations this summer….

Endurance

This award-winning documentary released last year is directed by the Oscar-winning couple of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who gave us the terrifying and incredibly well-filmed mountaineering documentary Free Solo. Once again, they raise the bar of documentary, making with a pacy and engaging film, mixing history with human interest.

Endurance is narrated by Dan Snow and tells two impressive stories of nautical achievement in parallel. The trailer is here.

Firstly, there is the recent quest for the sunken polar exploration vessel Endurance in the icy and frost bound Weddell Sea off Antarctica, an expedition funded by a wealthy and unnamed donor using the South African icebreaker S. A. Agulhas II as a platform for the high-tech search.

Endurance was abandoned by Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 when it was stranded in the ice, then pulled in a circular gyre for ten months before sinking on November 21, 1915, after being crushed by the ice floe (full history here).

There are no shipworms in the Antarctic, due to the lack of trees on the continents, only worms that feast on whale bones, so the survey crew were confident that if they could locate the wreck, it would be in pristine condition.

The expedition team on board the modern icebreaker were back for a second attempt to find Shackleton’s ship, following the bitter disappointment of losing Ocean Infinity’s autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) over the suspected site of the lost ship in early 2019 – a story we covered here.

But – spoiler alert – this time in March 2022, the captain and the ice pilot on S. A. Agulhas II, Knowledge Bengu and Freddie Ligthelm, brought the vessel to the search spot, and Deep Ocean Search launched its tethered AUV into 3,000 metres of water….

In parallel with the modern story of comfort and excitement aboard a state-of-the-art icebreaker, the film shows retells the incredible tale of the survival of Shackleton and his crew, a story of heroism and rescue. This was a considerably more arduous undertaking.

After Endurance sank, Shackleton and his crew trudged across the ice dragging the ship's lifeboats, which they then used to sail to Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands.

Unfortunately, it was clear that in the middle of World War One, nobody was going to come to rescue them from this bleak and inhospitable spot, so Shackleton and five companions then set sail in the open boat James Caird on a voyage of 1,300 kilometres through the Southern Ocean to South Georgia.

Having reached the island via the amazing, pinpoint celestial navigation of Frank Worsley, and surviving seas that test even modern mariners, they then undertook the first crossing of the island, hiking across mountains, glaciers, scree and all, to reach a whaling station and raise the alarm to send rescue for the main body of the stranded crew subsisting on seal meat back on Elephant Island.

This odyssey is vividly retold by the filmmakers using the remarkable century-old photos from the original glass plate negatives taken by the Endurance expedition’s official photographer, Frank Hurley, by colourised original film footage, and from the original diaries of Sir Ernest Shackleton himself.

The entire Endurance crew home came home safely after two years of arduous endeavour. The modern expedition found the wreck and took some epic footage of the legendary ship, which is now a protected site under the Antarctic Treaty.

As book recommendations, we can also add The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Gripping Story of Finding Shackleton's Endurance by expedition archaeologist Mensun Bound and the official National Geographic tie-in book, Endurance: The Discovery of Shackleton's Legendary Ship, by John Shears and Nico Vincent, two of the expedition leads.

Mr Bound is a Falkland Islander with an impressive track record in maritime discovery, whose achievements include the survey and partial salvage of the wreck of the German World War Two pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off Montevideo in 2004, and the location of the wreck of the World War One German armoured cruiser SMS Scharnhorst, which was  the flagship of Admiral Graf von Spee himself, sunk in battle off the Falkland Islands in December 1914.

After these two movies of survival against the odds, our next films take a much darker turn.

Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster (Netflix) and/or Implosion (BBC2)

One of the myths about successful American tech entrepreneurs is that they should “move fast and break things” as they innovate and experiment to disrupt industries and build new businesses quickly. This ethos is all about making mistakes and correcting them rapidly along the way, rather than playing it stodgy, slow and safe.

“Move fast and break things” became prominent as a “tech bro” mantra when Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it the official motto of the company and instructed his staff to hang a poster emblazoned with the exhortation in all of the company’s offices.

This may work well in the software industry, where a few bugs and some glitchy applications may be mildly inconvenient for users. In the marine industry, however, it invites death and disaster.

In fact, the whole business of marine classification societies like the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, and Bureau Veritas is to codify industry rules and centuries of maritime learning and best practice to prevent said death and disaster at sea.

The use of a seemingly captive, second-tier classification society is one of the main criticisms we have levelled against Perenco when we covered a fatal blow-out in Gabon last year (here and here). But at least Perenco had a third-party classification society reviewing its facilities, albeit one that is not a member of the International Association of Classification Societies.

The owner of OceanGate, which charged its wealthy clientele US$250,000 per passenger for deepwater dives in its seven-metre long, carbon fibre submarine Titan, did not use any classification society certification whatsoever, and was not bound by any industry regulations or standards for his vessel.

The submersible had made 80 successful dives between 2021 and 2022, including 13 to the same water depth as the wreck of Titanic, but with each dive, the carbon fibre was gradually degrading and becoming less stable. Netflix’s documentary captures Rob McCallum, who previously advised OceanGate, stating that Titan's failure was a, "mathematical certainty." Damage incurred to the hull on the last dive in 2022 should have been a major warning sign.

These two documentaries capture the hubris and arrogance of the company’s co-founder and CEO, 61-year-old Stockton Rush, whose vision of creating a new underwater tourism business to the wreck of Titanic cost him his own life and that of four unfortunate passengers: British explorer Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet. They died when Titan imploded in over 3,300 metres of water on June 23, 2023, when the carbon fibre chamber failed under the high pressure of the deep dive.

The vessel was 90 minutes into a descent to the site of the doomed ocean liner in the North Atlantic when it lost contact with mission control on the surface support vessel Polar Prince. Polar Prince is a Canadian icebreaker built in 1959 (yes, 1959 – not a typo) and that OceanGate had chartered from its First Nations owners, the Miawpukek people.

On Polar Prince, Stockton’s wife Wendy was in radio contact with the submersible, and the BBC documentary captures awful video footage of her hearing the dull thud that marked the implosion of the submersible and the instant death of her husband and his passengers, but at the time, she did not realise what had happened as she subsequently received a text from the submarine.

The trailer for Netflix’s Titan is here and the one for BBC’s Implosion is here. The BBC covers more of what happened, Netflix covers more of why it happened, and the ten years of experimentation by Mr Rush that led to the disaster.

For four days, it appeared that maybe Titan had experienced a ballasting problem and perhaps it would return to the surface if control could be regained.

This hope died with the discovery of wreckage 500 metres away from the actual wreck of Titanic, which was videoed by an ROV sent down from the large anchor handler Horizon Arctic, along with confirmation of the recording of the tell-tale implosion from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration underwater sound monitoring device some 1,500 kilometres away.

The investigation by the US Coast Guard and by reporters then revealed the grim truth behind an entrepreneur whose grand vision for subsea exploration was fatally marred by a complete disregard for engineering practice and safety.

Mr Rush had lied about partnerships with Boeing, NASA and the University of Washington. It transpired that a US$50 Logitech F710 wireless PC gamepad was used to operate the sub. Past passengers and OceanGate staff reported alarming cracking noises from previous dives. A previous model had been scrapped in 2019 after the hull split.

The Netflix documentary broadcasts an audio recording of an internal meeting in OceanGate from 2018 where Mr Rush sacked the company’s operations director for questioning the safety of the submersible.

"I don’t want anybody in this company who is uncomfortable with what we’re doing," Mr Rush told the soon-to-be-former operations director. "We’re doing weird s**t here and I am definitely out of the mould. There’s no question. I am doing things that are completely non-standard."

The coast guard’s official investigation in the catastrophic failure of the submersible has not been released publicly. However, we can expect its recommendations will likely include third-party certification of future commercial submarines…

And we know that the fragmented nature of the maritime industry, where each flag state can pretty much choose its own regulations as it sees fit, will make enforcement against determined and ambitious entrepreneurs like Mr Rush hard.

"Move quickly and break things" can be fatal as a mantra in offshore and shipping more generally. Anyone who tells you they are, "doing things that are completely non-standard," is probably best not employed in a design, engineering or operations capacity in a maritime organisation.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," the philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905. Unfortunately, in the marine industry, this means learning from past disasters and preventing them with constant vigilance, a tedious and Sisyphean task.

The irony of the wreck of Titan lying on the seabed beside the wreck of Titanic should be lost on nobody. The oceans hate hubris and really don’t care about your ego.

What about the books and podcasts?

Our full summer reading will be covered later. Reading a bunch of books takes a damn sight longer than watching a few movies and recommending the book tie-ins, so let me settle down in my idyllic beach paradise on a hammock and I will get back to you.

Background reading

Our first set of 2022 holiday shorts can be found here and part two is here. If you did not read Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel’s Dead in the Water, what are you waiting for? This masterful book from Bloomberg’s best investigative journalists describes a shocking scheme to defraud insurers of millions of dollars through the deliberate destruction of a laden crude tanker in the Gulf of Aden.

Who knew that the Greek tanker sector contained some very dark actors? At a time when seafarers are once again in the firing line off Yemen, this sordid true story is a reminder of the shocking amorality of some shipowners.

Similarly, Putin’s People by Catherine Belton and our other recommendation The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy have also stood the test of time.

Last year, we recommended Joseph Conrad’s classic novella of colonial misrule, Heart of Darkness, and David Grann’s horrible tale of eighteenth century shipwreck and mutiny, The Wager.

We didn’t run any recommendations in 2023, preferring to analyse Valaris and Tidewater’s results. Looking at our comments with two years of hindsight, it seems to be a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say in France, a most fitting sentiment for Bastille Day.