Review: “Asia’s Titanic” on National Geographic Channel

I was barely 2 years old when the Sulpicio Lines passenger ship MV Doña Paz and the Caltex-hired oil tanker MT Vector collided at sea on the night of December 20, 1987. It was just five days before Christmas so most of the people on board the vessel bound for Manila were merely looking forward to having a peaceful holiday. They had no idea that the ship they boarded was doomed to burn in flames.

More than two decades had passed since that ill-fated encounter off the shore of Mindoro island in the Philippines. With more than 4000 people dead, it beats Titanic’s death toll by two-fold. It is billed as the world’s deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history.

“Asia’s Titanic” is a retelling of this Philippine tragedy. It is the first all-Filipino produced full-length documentary for National Geographic Channel. The 10-million peso project took more than 3 years to make according to director Yam Laranas.

Only 24 people lived to tell the tale of Doña Paz. The first half of the documentary narrated the tragic events through the accounts of 3 sets of survivors: a father and his daughter, a trio of men and a former army soldier. I kept on hearing about this tragedy in the media when I was a kid but I never really paid any due attention to it. So it was truly an eye-opening experience to see the challenges those people had to go through just to survive the raging inferno at sea on that night.

Yam Laranas said in an interview that the show was not meant to be an investigative report. I was worried upon learning that because it’s the investigations that really draws me into documentaries like this. I was hesitant to attend the media preview because I thought it was only gonna be a 45-minute reenactment of the events. But thankfully, it wasn’t.

The second half of the show presented the results of the investigations conducted by the Board of Marine Inquiry and how the family of the victims reacted. Actual footage of the aftermath were shown to emphasize the weight of this tragic event. However, the show doesn’t really point to any one reason for the cause of it. It leaves the viewers free to speculate on this aspect.

Being both a Filipino and a fan of NatGeo, the feeling of watching something made by a Filipino team couldn’t have been more apparent to me in Asia’s Titanic. The soundtrack I’m afraid to say was average at best. I preferred the scenes where there wasn’t any music in the background at all. I thought the CGI was acceptable. However, they shouldn’t have played the same clip repeatedly during the course of the show. The actors playing the survivors were just what I expected from a Philippine production so it was alright. Overall, the second half of the program was the better half of this documentary.

Three more ships of the Sulpicio Lines met with disaster since Doña Paz. Interestingly, there’s an 8-year gap in between each of them. The latest of which was just last year with MV Princess of the Stars which was allowed to sail despite the ominous threat of a typhoon. The shipping firm was cleared of all criminal liabilities in three of the mishaps its ships were involved in. Director Yam Laranas and his team chose Doña Paz for their entry because they felt that it’s a story the world needs to know. By delivering this informative documentary, not only did they succeed in that goal but they also made more Filipinos become aware of the issues that concern maritime safety. And I salute Direk Yam and his team for that achievement.

Catch “Asia’s Titanic” on National Geographic Channel Asia at these times:
August 30, Sunday, 9pm
August 31, Monday, 1am/5am
September 5, Saturday, 6pm
September 28, Monday, 8pm
September 29, Tuesday, 1pm