SHIPWRECKED: NIGHTMARE AT SEA

Here is the decision. This is a very good documentary about a real catastrophe, and its method is what makes it work. Interviews with passengers and crew are cut together with footage shot during the disaster itself, so you are not being told what happened — you are watching it alongside the people it happened to.
It is also a film with faith in it. Several interviewees describe helping strangers at their own cost: a couple loading lifeboats, crew members getting others out knowing it meant they would be left behind. One couple credits God's grace for their survival. Another passenger remembers praying with the people in his lifeboat.
The cost is fear, and a little language. Six obscenities including one "f" word, two OMG profanities, and long stretches of footage from inside a tilting ship that are frightening by design. Injuries are described — a broken leg, bleeding from a fall — though nothing is shown.
So: if you have teenagers, watch it with them. This is a conversation worth having. If you have young children, wait.

In 2012 the Costa Concordia set sail carrying more than 4,000 passengers. Everything went according to plan until the ship left its course — steered close to the shoreline of Giglio Island so that a crew member could give his family a sail-by salute, horn and all.
The rocks did the rest. What follows is told by the people who lived it: passengers and crew describing their navigation through a ship that was no longer level, their efforts to get others out, and the journeys they made to safety.

Four stars, and the reason is construction. Documentaries about disasters usually explain; this one immerses. The interviews carry the emotional weight — chilling, firsthand, specific — and the footage captured during the sinking puts you inside the event rather than in a chair being briefed about it. The two are cut together so that the panic and desperation register as they were felt, not as they were later summarized.
It is also patient with the aftermath. Rather than settling for the easy story of one reckless captain, the film follows investigators into the less satisfying truth: a faulty emergency generator, a crucial breakdown in communication between the captain and the helmsman, and a crewman promoted before he was ready by a company struggling to keep pace with its own growth. That is harder to dramatize, and more honest.

This documentary carries a strong moral and Christian worldview, and unusually, it earns both words from the people on screen rather than from narration.
The moral part is the behavior it records. A couple stayed to help load lifeboats. Crew members guided passengers to safety even though it meant they were left behind. On a night that gave everyone permission to think only of themselves, some people did not — and the film gives them the time to say so.
The Christian part is explicit. One interviewed couple speak often about their faith, saying they were saved "by God's grace." Another passenger recalls praying with the people crowded into a lifeboat. The film does not editorialize about any of it. It simply lets belief stand as part of the record, which is more persuasive than argument would be.
It is honest about the other half, too. Passengers describe others pushing past them to reach the lifeboats first, thinking only of themselves. The captain lied about the severity of the accident and left the ship before all of his passengers and crew were off; he was sentenced to sixteen years for it. Both kinds of behavior were true on the same night, on the same decks, sometimes in the same corridor. That refusal to make people simpler than they are may be the most biblical thing about the film.
Scripture sets the two side by side without flinching, and names the higher one: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

Eighty-seven minutes with people who survived something most of us cannot imagine, and who mostly want to talk about the ones who helped them. It is frightening, it is well made, and it leaves you thinking about what you would have done in that corridor. Watch it with your teenagers. Our answer stands: worth watching — teens and adults.