The latest film about the Titanic doesn’t show Leonardo DiCaprio standing up on the bow’s railings — instead, a single slim filament of coral takes his place as the king of the world.
That’s just one of the scenes from “Titan — A Viewport to Titanic,” a newly released 20-minute video that recaps OceanGate Expeditions‘ dives to the world’s best-known shipwreck in 2021 and 2022.
The film was assembled from high-resolution video captured during a series of dives made by OceanGate’s Titan submersible — a vessel that was designed specifically to take its crews 12,600 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean to document the site, year over year.
“Mission specialists, scientists and Titanic experts helped OceanGate Expeditions capture over 50 hours of high-resolution 4K and 8K footage and images of the wreck site,” Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, said in a news release.
“Titan — A Viewport to Titanic” is narrated by Rory Golden, a veteran Titanic diver and explorer who’s part of the OceanGate team.
As the scenes unfold, Golden points out spots of interest amid the wreckage: the coral sticking up from the bow, for instance, or strands of coral waving in the deep as the Titan submersible passes along the hull.
Golden said the ship’s condition has deteriorated markedly in the two decades since he made his first Titanic dive. He took special note of the ship’s main mast and its door to the crow’s nest. That’s where lookouts sighted the iceberg that dealt the luxury liner a death blow in 1912 during its debut voyage from Southampton, bound for New York.
“When I first dived on the ship in the summer of 2000, the main mast lay right across the well deck onto the bridge,” Golden says during the film. “And now, as we can see, it has completely collapsed. It’s very sad to see it like this.”
More than 1,500 passengers and crew died in the disaster, which inspired the Oscar-winning “Titanic” movie with DiCaprio’s “King of the World” scene.
Some of the places featured in that movie — such as the Titanic’s grand staircase — were wiped out in the aftermath of the iceberg collision and the ship’s breakup. But OceanGate’s film highlights a few intriguing artifacts that survived, such as the chandeliers that can be seen sitting amid the wreckage, or the dangling crane that lowered one of the Titanic’s lifeboats to the sea more than a century ago, or the telemotor mechanism that played a part in steering the ship.
Several memorial plaques were laid down around the telemotor during previous expeditions. Today they’re encrusted with corrosion. “The three on the left-hand side are actually ones that I left on my dives in 2000 and 2005,” Golden said.
Reflecting on his work with OceanGate, Golden talked up the benefit returning to the Titanic site for multiple consecutive years.
“Having the year-over-year comparisons in addition to earlier footage will give historians important data about the ongoing deterioration of this UNESCO Heritage Site,” he said in today’s news release. “Some of what we are capturing now will one day be gone. The dramatic improvements and developments in camera and lighting technology have made this possible. Being a part of this important documentation initiative is the opportunity of a lifetime.”
OceanGate Expeditions is already planning for the 2023 Titanic Expedition in May and June. “We will continue to work with those joining us as mission specialists and maritime archaeologists to characterize the deterioration of the wreck as we capture fresh footage in 2023 and beyond,” Rush said.
A limited number of slots are open for mission specialists who pay a support fee to participate in the project, OceanGate Expeditions says. Past mission specialists have included a documentary camera operator, a comedy writer-podcaster, a planetary scientist and two investors who previously rode into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship. The mission support fee for 2023 is $250,000.
