While some of it feels like retelling a story already disturbingly detailed in the very good “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” in 2022, Rory Kennedy’s follow-up, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,” contains more than enough righteous fury to justify your attention. Kennedy shifts focus from the deep flaws in the Boeing system that led to hundreds of deaths due largely to the inevitable things that happen when profit trumps safety, centering the people who tried to warn us. Other than a few detailed stretches involving how airplane parts made on different continents didn’t quite connect seamlessly or how bolts taken out of a door that were never reinserted nearly led to tragedy, Kennedy’s focus is on the people in this increasingly terrifying dynamic: Those who still fear for their safety after appearing in a doc like this one, those whose business model got Boeing here, and the millions who fly every year in planes that could be ticking time bombs.
Kennedy opens with the tragic story of John Barnett, who worked in quality control at Boeing for 32 years before becoming a whistleblower and reporting to the FAA that production of the 787 Dreamliner was so flawed it was unsafe. An interview subject in “Downfall,” the heartbreaking update between films, is that Barnett died by suicide in March 2024, and Kennedy’s follow-up makes the convincing case that the aggression directed at him from Boeing influenced that final decision. (Although she also largely dispels the internet rabbit holes that suggest that Boeing actually directly killed Barnett.) Whatever the specifics, the undeniable truth is that the distress over the entire Boeing situation contributed to Barnett’s death, and he was just a man trying to keep people safe.
One of Barnett’s big revelations was that many of the oxygen masks over your head as you fly across this country likely don’t work. Imagine something as harrowing as oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling of a plane, only for it not to do its only job. Barnett also detailed how metal shavings could soon lead to an airborne disaster. Friends and colleagues of Barnett pick up his life’s work in “Freefall,” many of them courageously sitting down to discuss what they know about the shift in work ethic at Boeing that now values profit over safety. Kennedy keeps successfully returning to the idea that the biggest flaw in this system is the leadership model, one built on the acolytes of Jack Welch, a man who turned General Electric into a money-making machine at the expense of quality. It’s one thing if your dishwasher breaks a few years earlier than the competitor’s brand—it’s a very different thing for the same what-if model to be applied to metal tubes going hundreds of miles an hour.
At times, Kennedy edges into sensational material more common to the Netflix Original machine, including some recreations of actual or near-disasters that don’t really serve the final product. She’s such a smart filmmaker—you must see “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” and “Last Days in Vietnam” if you have yet to do so—that she often finds a way to steer out of the fearmongering that could have dragged down the film, but she returns to what’s almost a sense of hopelessness in the final beats. Lines like “Boeing has to be held accountable” had me shouting, “How?!?”
The truth is that we’re in an era of increasingly ineffective corporate governance, when documented failures of a company as big as Boeing have almost no impact. At one point in the film, Boeing’s stock price was visible on the screen, and I was curious enough to check to see how much these international controversies and tragedies had impacted it. It’s nearly double the image in Kennedy’s film, and most analysts have it as a “buy.” As long as that much money is being made, doors can blow out and oxygen masks can fail. The sad truth is that it might take a true disaster to get the right people’s attention, and safety shouldn’t cost human lives. The “Freefall” in Kennedy’s title could refer to all of us stuck in this broken system, terrified of what happens when we hit the ground.
