It feels so far away now given the current crisis facing the world, but it was only a year ago that the world was facing a smaller-scale crisis thanks to the evidently disastrous design of Boeing’s 737 Max aircrafts. Now, in what is being presented as a way to “put a human face” and the hundreds of lives lost in 737 crashes, filmmaker Rory Kennedy (Last Days In Vietnam, Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib) is going to direct a documentary about the airliner, Boeing, and the people who have died for Netflix. It was originally planned as a series, but Variety now says it’s being reimagined as a feature documentary, with a lot of “first-person accounts” and (apparently) an approach that will specifically allow audiences to “make up their own minds about what happened and why.”
Somewhat interestingly, Variety says the documentary will “explore the reputation crisis” that Boeing has had to handle in the wake of the 737 disasters, which is a surprising angle since Boeing is the ridiculously massive company that sold the aircraft, but maybe that’s where the “make up their own minds” thing comes in. There could be stories here we don’t know about… which would make this a worthwhile subject for a documentary. Huh!