A documentary that could have lasted a bit longer.
Netflix has a big problem when it comes to documentary series – and some other types of shows – where they stretch an hour of content into a seven-episode mini-series. But Shipwrecked has the opposite problem.
If you’re unfamiliar with the documentary’s topic, it’s about the 2012 Costa Concordia luxury cruise ship wreck. A modern-day titanic and what happened while the ship was going down.
I first learned about this Costa Concordia while watching the 46-minute video by the Internet Historian which covers much of the same material as Netflix’s doc does, so I knew a bit about the shipwreck before watching this with my wife.
Since I already knew much of what happened during the wreck, much of the info in the doc wasn’t new to me. What was new, was the first-hand accounts by some of the survivors on the ship.
These first-hand stories did add enough detail to the documentary to keep me interested, but besides that, much of the information covered in the doc was pretty old – the shipwreck happened in 2012 and Internet Historian’s video came out five years ago.
The documentary could have added more about the legal battle the captain went through. It could have covered the discovery of evidence. It could have covered the specific things that went wrong. The whole documentary – rightfully so – sets up the captain as a villain – and then does nothing with it at the end besides five-minutes of his eventual trial.
This could have easily been another hour of great storytelling and give a face to the cause of the wreck, instead of only focusing on what happened during the wreck.
Decent documentary. Watch if you don’t know anything about the Costa Concordia. Skip if you already know the story.
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