Filmmaker Rory Kennedy’s “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” is perhaps the quintessential modern American tale. A prestigious company that had the most outstanding reputation in aviation, cultivated over several decades pissed that all away, and was responsible for the deaths of almost 350 people through cutting corners and taking shortcuts meant to maximize profits and appease shareholders. That feels like modern-day America in a nutshell: a country that appears to be coasting on the “greatest country on earth” laurels and slowly, and increasingly, losing its reputation and international standing by taking the quick and easy path, leading to disastrous results.
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To that end, ‘Downfall’ is not at all a surprising documentary, either thematically or in its basic plot. It spends its first half waxing poetically about the golden age of Boeing, the esteemed planes they created by the greatest engineers in the world of out of Seattle, the company culture centered around the pride of excellence, safety, and quality. Its second half details how it all fell apart and the slippery slope of fast and cheap decisions that got the company there in the first place. It’s a well-made, very competent documentary, but it’s a little on the bland side and attempts to make the viewer outraged by detailing how a company puts a premium on profits over safety. Perhaps more naïve audiences will be outraged, but anyone who has been paying even semi-close attention to the United States and the way its corporations get away with murder on a daily basis (literally or figuratively), ‘Boeing’ just seems like the sad, next-in-line tale of American-engineered undoing.
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The story is one of negligence, carelessness, stupidity, and avarice and essentially begins in 2018, which is on record for one of the safest periods in aviation. With 10,000 aircraft in service in more than 150 countries, industry leader Boeing is still on top after losing ground to Europe’s AirBus a few years earlier. But then, one of their new Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia killed over 100 people and then another crash, five months later in Ethiopia, killing 346 people in total. Eventually, then-President Donald J. Trump decided to make an executive order to ground the planes—the first President in the history of the United States ever to do so—following the failure of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to do so (by then China and many major countries around the world had grounded the plane themselves).
What ensues is a surgical-like examination of what happened between the first plane crashing (October 2018) and the second plane crashing (March 2019), the President’s grounding of the model (March 2019), and the aftermath. But again, nothing will surprise you if you’ve ever worked in corporate America and watched a company cut back on employees and make them do more with less (literally every company in this country). If you’ve ever been part of a merger and watched a company’s integrity and corporate culture be consumed by the company that bought it (McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing in 1997 and set the stage for its shabbiness to come), you won’t at all be surprised either. In fact, it’s hard to be an alive, awake, and aware American and be remotely aghast at what transpires. Yes, let’s not get it twisted; these deaths are appalling, tragic, and shameful. Still, something about the assembly-line congregation of damming and incriminating facts just makes it feel like the cost of doing business in America.
Kennedy is an Academy Award-nominated (“Last Days in Vietnam,” 2014, and Primetime Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” 2007), and she always makes sturdy, handsome films, but ‘Boeing’ has no actual thrusters and almost feels like a CNN compilation of cause and effect facts and consequences. To that end, while surviving families are given ample time to vent their sadness and rage, ‘Downfall’ lacks the proper emotional punch that separates these kinds of investigative doc procedurals.
‘Downfall’ gets into the weeds, too, explaining the culprit: a new software added to the planes that essentially malfunctioned. The particulars aren’t fascinating, but it’s not so much the software itself but how Boeing implemented it. The company introduced new software without telling pilots —a big red flag in the aviation industry—who traditionally are aware of every element of how their plane functions. As this scandal starts to grow— especially as Boeing was trying to blame “foreign” pilots with a lot of not-so-subtle racism about their competency— a mountain of lies and cover-ups pile up as Boeing tried to either stall or cover their tracks, failing miserably in the process. While ‘Downfall’ should leave you in disbelief—how such a respected company fell apart as they prioritized Wall Street over the reputation and safety of their passengers—the story is all too familiar and even customary these days.
Full of aviation technical context and talking-head interviews with aviation experts, engineers, dedicated journalists, surviving family members, and more, “Downfall” might even be a cautionary tale about corporate cautionary tales. Not to encourage apathy or indifference, god, this story, on its face, is disgraceful. But given how accustomed we are to hearing familiar stories about corporate cover-ups, cultures of concealment, corruption, and being beholden to Wall Street, filmmakers may have to develop a more engaging way to keep audiences engaged. Otherwise, what’s being offered—sadly, yes—feels like a feature-length logical conclusion of what 60 Minutes can get across in one condemning segment. [C+]
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Netflix will release “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” on February 18.