111 years ago, tragedy unfolded in the Atlantic Ocean when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk mere hours later, and now another disaster has unfolded around that same spot. Earlier this week, a “jerry-rigged” submersible containing five people who were investigating the ship’s wreckage went missing, and today, OceanGate, the company behind this expedition, released a statement saying that these individuals are now believed to be dead. James Cameron, director of the 1997 blockbuster hit Titanic, has since shared his thoughts on this horrific event, drawing a chilling parallel to the original maritime catastrophe.
Along with Cameron making the Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet-starring disaster epic about two young lovers aboard the ill-fated ship, he’s explored the Titanic wreckage multiple times, putting the experiences from many of those trips to good use on the 2003 documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. Taking that into account, plus having once designed his own submersible, and thus being aware of the “engineering problems” and “safety protocols” associated with this type of vehicle, he’s more than qualified to give his take on the unfortunate events surrounding the Titan submersible, which embarked on Sunday. Here’s what he had to say about the tragedy while speaking with ABC News:
Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub. A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified and so on. I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. And for us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.
History often has a way of repeating itself, and often not for the better. This is one of those instances, with James Cameron astutely pointing out that just like how Captain Edward John Smith was warned that Titanic was approaching an iceberg, yet didn’t make any effort to avoid it ahead of time, so too was proper caution not exercised with this submersible going to check out the Titanic wreckage. This time, it’s resulted in the deaths of five people: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, with the latter four paying $250,000 apiece to visit the wreckage aboard the Titan, which had been unveiled to the public in 2019.
James Cameron’s comments come just a few days after Parks Stephenson, an explorer who worked with the filmmaker on the Titanic movie, commented on the missing submersible, which included noting the “public demand for information regarding” the Titanic wreck. It’s also worth mentioning that Cameron knew Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who was a submersible dive pilot, and the director said that Nargolet dying the way he did “is almost impossible” for him to process. Prior to OceanGate releasing its statement, a United States Coast Guard spokesperson said that five major pieces of debris from the Titan submersible were found near the Titanic wreckage; the vehicle likely had a “catastrophic implosion,” and it’s unlikely that the five individuals’ bodies will be found due to the “incredibly unforgiving environment” underwater.
We here at CinemaBlend express our condolences to the families and friends of those who were lost in this terrible event. For those of you interested in seeing James Cameron’s work on Titanic, that movie can streamed with an Amazon Prime Video subscription. Afterwards, take a look through our collection of Titanic behind-the-scenes facts.
