Rory Kennedy’s Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing was always going to be a difficult documentary for me to watch. I was recently laid off from Boeing, and needless to say, the entire process was dehumanizing and humiliating. Much of what is said in this documentary resonates with me, and many of the experiences described by the whistleblowers are experiences I encountered myself. However, it is important to separate my own experience at Boeing from what the documentary presents. While Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing will undoubtedly make you angry and frustrated, it ultimately feels like another standard Netflix documentary. It’s effective at provoking outrage, but offering little that is new to the broader conversation.
From start to finish, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is about as Netflix-coded as you can get for a Netflix documentary. The documentary is filled to the brim with screenshots of news articles, clips from television news reports, courtroom footage, and court documents. As these elements flash across the screen, interviews and voiceovers from whistleblowers and people who were directly affected by Boeing’s negligence narrate this story. The documentary makes no attempt to hide the picture it is trying to paint of Boeing. It portrays the company as a greedy and heartless corporation, more focused on maximizing shareholder value than improving safety and quality.
However, much of this documentary’s portrayal of Boeing is made up of information that is already widely available to the public. Nearly all of the footage featured in the film comes from news outlets and courtroom footage that is readily accessible. All of the court documents presented in the film are also available to the public. And all of the people interviewed for the film are individuals who have already widely spoken to the press and government officials about Boeing’s negligence. For a documentary presenting itself as an investigative film, it does very little actual investigation.
Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing presents no new evidence of Boeing’s negligence. It provides no new insights into Boeing’s failures and doesn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already known to the general public. Worst of all, Freefall is mostly a repeat of Kennedy’s previous Boeing documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. The first two-thirds of Freefall focuses mostly on the negligence that led to the crashes of the two 737 MAX aircraft. This time, however, those incidents are told from the perspective of the whistleblowers. By the time the documentary gets to Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, where a door plug blew out during the climb in 2024, Freefall shockingly does little to investigate the incident beyond confirming the documentary’s own predetermined narrative about Boeing.
In the end, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is less an investigative piece of journalism and more a portrait of information that is already known. Don’t get me wrong, the filmmakers and the subjects of the documentary have every right to be angry at Boeing. Because of Boeing’s negligence, hundreds of lives were lost. However, that does not excuse the documentary’s laziness. Instead of actually investigating Boeing and presenting new information to the public, Freefall is simply a compilation of information that is not only already known, but widely available for anyone willing to look for it. Freefall is just another in a long line of Netflix documentaries that is more focused on telling a story than actually doing the investigative journalism that the subject deserves.
My Rating: C-
Freefall A Reckoning for Boeing is now available on Netflix.
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