Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea – documentary review

After a prolonged slumber, I Love Disaster Movies returns with a review of the highly anticipated Netflix documentary Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea. It covers the now-infamous Costa Concordia shipwreck as it smashes into rocks on the coast of the island of Giglio when attempting an ill-fated passing-by salute. There have been a couple of absolutely superb documentaries about this disaster already, including Caught On Camera and The Cost of Concordia. This feature-length documentary mixes passenger footage with survivors retelling their accounts of events, interspersed with translations of calls and blackbox recordings. Is it another hit?

The disasters faced

A showman captain with more confidence than resolve, a boat with technical issues, a rocky coastline ready to tear a hole into the ship, and poorly trained staff unable to manage a safe evacuation.

The story

Retelling the 2012 shipwreck of the Costa Concordia is both an easy and hard task. Most of the publicly shared footage has been used elsewhere, so it requires a strong narrative and explanatory information to sew all the footage together. Shipwrecked splits its focus between several passengers and crew. We have new parents John and Meghan, with their tiny tot Lila. Nicholas is planning to propose to Patricia. Stefania is a young teen on board to celebrate her mum’s 50th birthday. Rose is a crew entertainer, Manoj a chef, and Manrico the hotel manager. Each has their own story of survival that requires wrestling for life jackets, lifeboats, a helicopter rescue for Rose, and a diving rescue for Manoj. They tell their stories bravely and vividly, although sometimes it feels like the cameras are panning to a stone-faced partner as if to imply they are still in day-one shock 13 years later. There are some genuinely heroic moments and some heartfelt and poignant moments.

Alongside this, Captain Schettino’s orders from the bridge, and other calls he made during his cowardly escape, leaving his passengers for dead, are drip-fed in around the survival stories. What this does incredibly well is juxtapose the growing dread of the passengers and crew, alongside the increasingly panicked denial from Schettino. Listening to him lie about the gravity of the issues to save face as passengers start to argue for lifeboat spaces is powerful. Wisely, out of respect for those who are lost, Schettino’s role in the story fades out midway through to arise at the end with the trial section. The last 15 minutes focus on who was at fault, and whilst Schettino was certainly the lead issue, other mechanical and procedural problems played a role too. By then, 32 passengers and crew, and one salvage worker had died from the disaster, whilst Costa Concordia lay lifeless like a tomb on the seabed, half submerged.

Why its worth watching

Some of the survivor stories are new, and those that aren’t are told in more detail than previous, shorter documentaries. The footage is a mixture of mobile video and professional photographs, and I found the dive rescue footage to be particularly fascinating. Seeing the Costa Concordia on its side, with the water slide sticking half out of the water, is surreal. Similarly, the kitchen and restaurant on its side, half submerged, looks like the scene of nightmares. The music score is restrained to allow the stories to be told, and the footage speaks for itself.

To help explain where different people were on the ship, a digital cross-section of the layout is used with a sweeping camera and visual highlights to point out different stories. That’s helpful because, as the ship is constantly listing and sinking, some passengers are going down into the water, whilst others are being tipped up into the air. That said, a couple of times I did have to relisten to some accounts to fully understand a decision or where they went next.

Overall, everything is structured like a traditional survivors-footage documentary and retelling. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s exactly what I expected.

The effects

Whilst there are no “effects”, I do wonder if some of the mobile video footage may have been upscaled slightly to make it easier to watch on bigger TVs. It is still grainy, pixelated, and unsteady, and it’s subtle if they have treated the video footage, it’s subtle. I’ve seen some of the footage on previous documentaries, and I’m sure it looked blockier. Maybe I just have a bad copy!

The characters

Whilst there aren’t characters, as these are all real people, I must say that most of the people featured come across as particularly friendly and approachable. I also appreciate that, whilst we do end up with a journalist joining the documentary an hour in, she doesn’t make it too much about her, and purely covers the blame and trial portion of the documentary. All too often, these types of documentaries have a reporter who’s “in it” and “I’ve got to tell this story”. They make it about them, when the story never should be. This, and the additional cave diver rescue and data restoration specialist, stay quite factual and don’t spin the drama up more than the waves and rocks haven’t already churned.

Favourite quote

That looks just like Titanic!

an onlooker from giglio island as a camera shows the lights of the costa concordia listing heavily in the dark.

Three memorable moments

• Manrico tearing up about his cave dive rescue, saying “it’s been 13 years, and I still cry”. I am not surprised, mate!
• The restaurant footage of red wine spilt everywhere post-collision, and people mingling around, gathering frenzy.
• Rose talking about the moment she realised she was stranded on the high side of the ship, talking about her “life reel”. It’s mixed with childhood and teenage photos, to really hammer home the emotions.

The obligatory weird moment

Whilst a lot of the scandal around Schettino is not covered in this documentary, he comes across as a bumbling coward, out of his depth. It is difficult to cover all the stories, but some of the background voices seem to streamline the storytelling, too, as if Manrico is the known last person left alive. As we know from Stefania’s tragic account, there are plenty of missing victims still.

If I were to choose one slightly strange moment, though, it’d be a comment from survivor John. He starts a sentence early on with “I’ve been accused of not showing my emotions”, and it seems like he is having a bit of a passive-aggressive dig at the time. It’s quite jarring, and it made me tilt my head like an inquisitive puppy. I think it is explained later in the documentary, though, as John goes on to speak about his PTSD and struggles post-disaster. It just feels a bit strange to hear the first time around!

The drinking game

Every time someone who should be in charge and ordering an evacuation doesn’t do their job. Whether it’s by choice or by design from awful leadership from the captain, there was a systematic failure across the ship. It shouldn’t be up to passengers to man the lifeboats and regulate numbers…

Conclusion

Whilst I think Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea is a well-put-together documentary, I don’t think it is any “better” than the Caught on Camera documentary. There are more details of the scandals in the Internet Historian’s YouTube video than in this documentary, if that’s more your thing, too. At least this is more tonally appropriate and gives an element of closure for a few of the survivors who have had their lives dramatically changed from that fateful night. Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea is a perfectly respectful documentary, but it lacks some of the human gravitas and narrative string connections that the very best of the genre provide.

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

If you enjoyed Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea, you may also like…

• Costa Concordia: Caught on Camera – a fine documentary that uses a lot of the same footage.
• Fire in Paradise – a short, but excellently put together documentary of survivor footage and accounts of a raging wildfire
• The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari – another Netflix disaster escape documentary from survivors’ accounts of the eruption.