Mark Reviews Movies: DOWNFALL: THE CASE AGAINST BOEING

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

Within a period of five months, two planes crashed during takeoff, killing everyone onboard. The planes were the same model by the same manufacturer, and given how infrequent commercial airline accidents are, the rule of numbers really can't apply here. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing quickly makes it clear that these fatal incidents weren't coincidences.

It was the plane, of course—not, as Boeing stated on both occasions (in an act of rather naked prejudice), human error, caused by pilots from India and Ethiopia. Anyone who could make the simple connection could see through the PR damage control, but that it took the unnecessary deaths of 346 people for anyone to question how these planes ended up on runways around the world is appalling.

Director Rory Kennedy doesn't have too many questions that haven't already been asked and answered by investigators, whistleblowers, and politicians. The filmmaker's obvious goal here is simply to put those inquiries and revelations into a tightly constructed, easy-to-understand package.

On that level, this documentary is exactly what it needs to be. By the end, one is left with outrage at the human cost of the usual corporate malfeasance: cutting corners, ignoring warnings, passing blame, and covering up in the name of making a profit. A few years after the fatal crashes and the pages upon pages of damning evidence, though, Kennedy's movie unintentionally leaves us with a lot more questions, which it bypasses for the easier, more direct route.

The narrative begins with the crashes (re-created using simplistic computer animation) and, with a lot of expert interviews and archival news footage, moves to the growing suspicion that Boeing might not have been completely honest about their explanation (One of the documentary's major oversights is its lack of curiosity as to why the U.S. government was so slow to ground the planes, even after countries around the world did). Finally, Kennedy digs into the evidence of the company's (technically alleged—since the whole mess was legally settled out of court) intentional deception about its newest plane.

A history of the company's glory days for safety, productivity, and sales comes across as a too-cheery distraction, especially once the company's changes policy become the issue (and because the veneer of its reputation apparently allowed some major oversights from regulatory bodies). As important as the human side of the story may be, interviews with family members of the victims don't quite fit into Kennedy's step-by-step analysis of the planes' flaws and the dissection of the cover-up.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing clearly answers what happened and why it did happen. At this point, a bigger and more pressing question might be how so many people outside of the company failed to ask such questions before and immediately after that what and why killed hundreds of people.

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