User Reviews

A complex story well told. Bare faced greed of senior management ends up in deaths. As usual, the worst part is lengths people go to engage in a cover up.

Boeing CEO Dennis A. Muilenburg resigns and walks away with $62 million. It's a wonderful world. And that's how everything works in this country: it's all for the money. Only money matters. 346 people died because Boeing executives only care about money.

This documentary should be shown to every new Airbus employee and executive, to learn how you should NOT do it.

Now on a more serious note: An interesting and sometimes even thrilling documentary, which was well-paced, had great interviews and outstanding music. It could've been a bit shorter, but if you like documentaries, it's definitely worth a watch.

"Downfall: The Case Against Boeing" (2022 release; 98 min.) opens with a clever montage of the good ol' days when Boeing enjoyed a stellar reputation for its safety record. We then go to "Jakarta, Indonesia" flight 160 is taking off, and things go horribly wrong, crashing minutes after takeoff. The widow of the flight's captain recounts the events of the day. At this point we are 10 min into the film.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from veteran documentarian Rory Kennedy ("Ghosts of Abu Ghraib"). Here she reassesses what led to not one, but two Boeing 737 MAX crashes within months of each other. More in particular, we are shown how a company's culture started changing from "safety at any cost" to "profit at any cost" after Boeing merges with McDonnell Douglas in 1996. Along the way, we get a Boeing 101 history lesson on how a company so identified with Seattle lost the plot and moved its HQ to Chicago (in 2001). There are plenty of talking heads, none more so than Wall Street Journal airline industry specialist Andy Pasztor, who exposes it all, damning article after damning article. When Boeing finally settles the FAA defrauding charges for $2.5 billion dollars, we now know what the worth is of a human life for Boeing: you divide that by the number of people (349) killed in the 2 crashes, and you come to about $7 million per perished person. Bottom line: while this documentary doesn't contain any new revelation as such, it nevertheless is nothing short of a blistering indictment of Boeing and its management.

"Downfall: The Case Against Boeing" premiered on Netflix just the other day. If you are in the mood to witness firsthand how one of America's erstwhile most treasured companies falls from grace in its never-ending pursuit of "increasing shareholder value", I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

Great documentary. Had my eyes glued to the TV. To be honest I had a really bad day the other day and have been very depressed and in a weird ironic way this movie made me feel better. Watching all these families grieve in pain made my problems seem trivial and made me look at the world in a bigger picture. It's sad what America allows to happen. These rich scumbags walked away with millions and no criminal prosecution. That CEO Muillenburgh makes my skin crawl, felt like I was staring at the devil in my own opinion. America really is crooked and shady (only really cares about making money for the few) all at the expense of others lives and dignity. Was crazy to see that China was the first country to ground this jet and set the standard to stand up to these crooked businessmen.

This movie is good as far as it goes but stops short of illuminating a missing link in the chain of failure that killed hundreds of people. Boeing took a calculated risk and were tragically wrong as far as the 737 Max redesign. Every transportation business faces a cost - benefit analysis in the production of their vehicles, The government is charged with the responsibility of ensuring the safety of these vehicles prior to certifying them for use. In this case the agency responsible is the FAA. It would be safe to assume air travel carries the heaviest burden for any agency other than perhaps the FDA. With this in mind one would think that only the best trained people would be placed in leadership of such an important agency. This is not the case, not even close. Boeing's redesign of the 737 was carried out and certified under the directorship of Michael Huerta at. The FAA. Mr. Huerta's education is listed in Wikipedia as: "Huerta received his bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Riverside and his master's in international relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University." If as a casual observer you question how much a political science major knows about the intricacies of the aerospace industry, you hit the core issue. Huerta could easily be called a political appointment without the technical knowledge to lead an agency as vital as the FAA. This type of appointment was neither rare previously nor has it been changed today. The latest director has the following education as listed by Wikipedia: Homendy is a native of Plainville, Connecticut. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pennsylvania State University and is a master's candidate at Clemson University. Notice the absence of what degrees she achieved, she is purely a political appointment. Neither of these people have the expertise to lead a safety agency.

Clearly Boeing failed it's workers, investors, and the flying public. They will be held accountable and pay dearly for their mistakes. Unfortunately this movie missed the elephant in the room, our safety agencies need to be cleared of political appointments and experts installed in those positions. Your life is in the hands of people profiting from placing you in danger. They exist in both the industry and in the agencies responsible for protecting you.

What a truly fascinating watch this was, a documentary that truly does not hold back. As someone that follows the news with interest, I remember watching news of both tragic crashes with horror, and in both cases, it was definitely the theory that both were due to pilot error, this gives you the true story.

It's almost brutal, it really does put Boeing, and its executives, indeed its company ethos to the sword, initially I thought the documentary focused too much on Boeing's history, but in hindsight it's all in context, it's all fully relevant, and all explained.

The eighties were amazing in so many ways, awful in others, definitely the era of greed, in The UK we had Thatcher, for The U. S. Wall Street, you will see here the consequences of a Company for whom the only focus is profit.

The camera footage of the worker being told about missing parts is on of the most shocking things I've seen for some time.

It's very well made, with some fascinating interviews, it's more on the factual side that the sensational side.

A fascinating documentary, 9/10.

This is the critical point of the film and its well showed. Hard to know if the company will change its ways.

My biggest disappointment is that the film didn't explain what the technical fix that has been approved!

Great documentary about a big, big scandal. This goes to the core about the money grabbing leaders behind a once prod company, where owners are more into making short sighted profits than make a good product.

Fire all safety staff, fire workers so they have to work harder no regards taken to safety.

And then lie about it. There's always money to be grabbed, and new can come in and save the rest when the downfall has started.

No wonder Airbus has taken over, and sadly, it's well deserved due to the leaders of Boeing.

Someone stes there's nothing new here!?

Well there is, and more to it: This needs to be known all across the world!

Well done!

I am a 737 MAX (and NG) captain and check airman for a major US airline with nearly 25 years of experience in 737s, and I must point out that there was a lot of missing context in this film. First off, though, let me say that much, if not most, of the criticism of Boeing is perfectly warranted and they have a lot to answer for. Building in a system like MCAS without notifying the pilots of its potential to catastrophically malfunction was unforgivable.

That said, there was a lot of information about the two crashes that the filmmakers either blithely skipped over without fully investigating or left out entirely, and based on the thoroughness of much of their research, I doubt that it simple oversight or lack of information. For example, criticisms of Lion Air's safety history and maintenance practices were dismissed out of hand, when in fact their maintenance was strongly implicated in the accident report (which was done very thoroughly and professionally by the Indonesian investigators, it must be said). Also, crew factors, which again were dismissed by the filmmakers, were major factors in both crashes, supported by the investigation reports, not by some Western better-than-thou attitude. It should be noted, too, that the very airplane that crashed in Indonesia had the same problem the day before the crash and the crew landed it safely, showing without a doubt that the situation, while novel and extraordinarily difficult, was not inescapably fatal, and lends credence to the criticism of the accident crews and to Lion Air's maintenance, or in this case, lack thereof.

The filmmakers, when presenting (briefly) the flight data recorder information from Lion Air, did not use the actual data in the report, but clearly used a graph they generated on their own, leaving out critical data, though that would not be obvious to the average viewer, but provides greater context into what happened. Likewise, they severely edited the cockpit voice recorder transcript, leaving out major revelations about the crew dynamics. And in the case of the Ethiopian crash, they published several headlines saying that the crew accomplished "most" of the prescribed emergency procedure, or that they "initially" followed the procedure, but the fact is that doing "most" of it doesn't lead to a happy outcome. The brutal truth is that they never disengaged the autothrottle (Step 2 of the emergency procedure for this situation), which is what led to the severe overspeed and their inability to manually trim the airplane. One hates to speak ill of the dead, but both crews made serious mistakes - though none of which come close to exonerating Boeing, it must be said.

So, bottom line: Could - and should - the MAX have been better right out of the gate? Absolutely. But was is necessarily fatally flawed? No.

While this film was compelling and damning, it was also incomplete - long on emotion and short on context.

So far I've watched multiple documentaries that underline the imapct of Wall Street on catastrophic events. Events like the housing market collapse, opioid epidemic, and obviously the plane crashes that this doc covers and they all have one thing in common. To put it in simple terms, a company employs new CEO -> CEO's main job is to maximize profits & market value -> CEO makes drastic decisions with one objective in mind -> CEO and board members receive chunky bonuses as a result of said decision. This kind of culture has to be heavily regulated, but then again I don't know who to trust less the government officials getting "donations" from corporations, or corporations whose morals are nonexistent.

Greed is a bottomless pit that sociopaths thrive in.

The saddest story is that ... whole world runs like this.

In every single big corporation, especially after merges, there's literally not about a product you build, but about ... charts for shareholders.

Maybe ... if you are a corporate like Boeing, and if somebody dies, then maybe a CEO, maybe all of the shareholders should be questioned because it's actually them who are responsible. One by one. Not Boeing company. It's them. First shareholder, second, third, CEO etc.

Many companies lost it's reputation because of shareholders greed. It's so unfair that they have absolutely no responsibility. All they do is taking money, and actually ruining company values from inside, for the sake of their own profit.

In every newspaper there shouldn't be: boeing this, boeing that. Maybe if every newspaper would mention specifically shareholders by name, maybe this would change something. Public opinion would have chance to "meet" them. All the hate is targeted at Boeing, but it's NOT boeing. It's the people behind. They have name. They are human beings. Not giving documents fast enough is not Boeing. It's specific people. Name, by name.

I read a lot about this. One of the greatest articles is from a guy who was both a pilot and a software engineer. In short - what Boeing did with this 737max plane was that, they tried to fix hardware issues (plane they designed badly), with software. This plane should never fly.

Revealing documentary which pit life risk vs greedy corporate. Rory Kennedy made proper intro about Boeing company before pinpointed the cause of two fatal crashes. Animation was clear to explain technical problems. It left us sad and angry.

This is how all corporates who are killing people should be ripped off 👍🏾👍🏾👍🏾👍🏾. Well documented one.excellent one.the movie is quick and well documented.

I was familiar with the story of Boeng and the 737 max , but did learn a bit more about the story. Well made film , with interviews with family members of the victims as well as former employees of the Boeng corporation. The sad part of the story is that there was zero accountability for the executives in charge of these 2 plane crashes . The company was fined like 2 billion dollars but the CEO resigned with a 65 million dollar golden parachute. Greedy corporate criminals will continue this awful behavior until they start locking them up. An informative documentary , recommend.

Profit over people, sadly that's become the American way and why they are no longer world leaders, despite of course always thinking they are but American Ego would be another documentary.

We already knew that the crashes were caused by MCAS, that Boeing tried hard to blame the pilots, and that Boeing "gamed" the FAA to get the 'Max out there. Two things that I heard for the first time on this documentary were: 1. After the Boeing/McDonnell merger, the McDonnell people took over. (how absurd is that?) 2. There was little chance that the MCAS could be deactivated in time should the need arise.

So that's all fine, and Boeing deserves to be taken to the woodshed for the MCAS disasters, but the lame reporter knows nothing about aircraft or design. They spent a lot of time talking to assembly workers, implying that they were being forced to ship aircraft with manufacturing problems when in fact the crashes were due to a single point failure in the design.

The documentary didn't spend one sentence on how that was allowed to occur.

I believe that the military has a version of that aircraft, they identified the single point failure, and said "nope", requiring additional hardware to be installed. Not a word on that in the documentary.

How effective of a fix is a software patch when the problem only happens when a piece of hardware fails?

And where is the outrage over Boeing's initial work-around: "if the aircraft pitches down uncontrollably, disengage MCAS".... I would either turn MCAS off on the taxiway or else not pilot the death trap in the first place.

Finally, the documentary exhibits no understanding between the topics of structural integrity, quality inspection on the assembly line, quality built into the design of the aircraft, fly-by-wire systems and their advantages, and how the design process works. The result is a tabloid documentary.

Yes my infamous puns - well I imagine they are. Just bare with me - as you hopefully will when it comes to this documentary and the second review I am doing for it. Not sure what happened with the first draft I did - but it is not available on imdb anymore. Boeing planes are still avaiblable though - even though this does not paint a nice picture ... but there are things stronger than others.

Also Boeing themselves of course are denying the allegations brought up in here. Is that enough and/or believable? That is something only time will tell - although nowadays most people stick with one idea/point and are more than tough to convey - impossible one might say. As impossible as people thought flying would be you ask? Maybe ... maybe even more so.

The documentary itself is quite well done, timeline and otherwise it is more than coherent too.