Titanic

I think this movie and Avatar ruined James Cameron for me. I do respect that the guy for his accomplishments to make himself such a big name, and I do recognize that he has made a lot of ground breaking steps when it comes to movie technology. Furthermore, before I decide to be objective, I often feel the need to go against the grain. Titanic is so universally loved that I can’t help but immediately try and shit on it. Luckily that is what Twitter is for, but when I write down reviews, I want to be as objective as I can. That is what I’m going to try and do. I have acknowledged my biases but now I go into Titanic with a clear mind and write exactly how I feel about it.

Titanic chronicles the story of the legendary largest ship created by man that suffered a tragic fate after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic. The actual story of Titanic is one of heroism, human suffering, and a lesson to show the folly of man’s hubris. And yes, those elements are in this story. Unfortunately, instead of making those the centerpiece of this story, we instead focus on two fictional characters and their Romeo and Juliet love story.

Before all that, the movie starts out with Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett, a treasure hunter who is looking for a diamond that was rumored to be aboard the Titanic when it sunk. He attracts the attention of Rose Dawson Calvert (played by the late Gloria Stuart) and she claims to have survived the sinking and that she was in possession of the diamond. She is brought aboard their ship and she begins to tell the story of her time on the Titanic.

In 1912, Rose Dewitt Bukater (played by Kate Winslet) was a privileged young woman betrothed to the heir of a Pittsburgh Steel Fortune, Cal Hockley (played by Billy Zane). Of course, she does not want to marry Cal and she feels trapped as she boards the Titanic being forced into the luxurious lifestyle of the first class passengers.

Right off the bat, Cry me a river!

Don’t get me wrong, Cal is an asshole. I’m actually kind of surprised that they didn’t give Billy Zane a mustache for him to twirl he is such a cookie cutter bad guy in this story. But Rose is just a little bit dramatic with how “trapped” she feels in this movie. She has the power to leave Cal, you see it at the end of the movie, but it takes being saved from a suicide attempt by Leonardo DiCaprio to get her to finally do it. There’s a really interesting story about breaking free from what’s expected of you and going off to live your life the way you want to, but its really muddled by the whole Celine Dion fueled love story in this film.

But before I get to that, the other half of that love story is Jack Dawson (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). Now I’ve seen Titanic a couple times but I don’t think I’ve ever really sat down and examined the film as a film and not a pop culture icon. I say this because I didn’t realize how horrible a character Jack Dawson is. Jack Dawson is a penniless wanderer who gets onto the Titanic by pure luck, winning his third class ticket in a game of poker. Put aside the fact that Leo took a while to get rid of his boyish looks and looks like he’s 16 in this film, he plays your basic charming 90’s hunk that basically could be on a poster that says not all who wander are lost. And I guess I knew remembered that he was your boy crush Leo in this film, but I never realized how much of a douche this guy is. Like Jack Dawson is your 1912 hipster, he’s so content and against the grain that you just wanna punch him. There’s a part where he’s sitting with the first class passengers at dinner and he just starts boasting about how his address is wherever he ends up and how he goes wherever the wind takes him. While I’m sure this was sexy in the 90s, it just comes off as lazy and a little annoying now.

These two star crossed lovers, torn apart by their social class and what is expected of them, find one another aboard the Titanic and if their status wasn’t enough to tear them apart, why not a horrific disaster that killed up to 1,635 people? The movie is basically divided into two parts. I remember when I was younger, the VHS had two tapes that you had to switch out half way through because VHS couldn’t hold a 3 hour long movie. The first half is your teeny bopper drama between Leo and Winslet, bucking conventions and falling in love with one another despite the social constructs they were born into. The second half is a full out disaster film with some really intense visuals and a lot more intrigue and suspense as the RMS Titanic begins to sink.

With the exception of a small part which I will mention, the second half is where I have to give Cameron credit. He knows how to film action and disaster as well as hundreds of people dying  in a way that is both respectful to the survivors and their families, and shows the full impact of what exactly happened. The visuals of a huge ship like this sinking, the water up to the necks of the survivors (water that was purposefully made freezing cold to bring a realism factor), and finally the bodies frozen in the water as they died from hypothermia, are really powerful and I would be silly not to give Cameron the credit he deserves there.

The biggest problem comes when the movie gets tripped up by the stupid love story that plagued the first half of this movie. There’s a scene when the boat is filling with water, people are panicking, and not only do we take time out from the real tragedy to focus back on this stupid love story, but Billy Zane’s character is so distraught over this betrayal that he pulls a gun on Jack and Rose! Yeah, like there is nothing more important than Leonardo DiCaprio running off with your trophy wife! EXCEPT THE SINKING BOAT YOU’RE ON WITH NOT ENOUGH LIFE BOATS TO SAVE EVERYONE!

When we were all younger and learning about the Titanic is school, it was a pretty straight forward case. Largest boat ever created at the time hits an iceberg. Boat sinks. Hundreds of people die. But the older I get, the more I do research into things and the more I start hearing about the stories of heroism of actual real life people on the Titanic. I start to recognize the themes that go along with the story of the Titanic when man tries to create something spectacular and his hubris is his downfall. I recognize the impacts this tragedy had on the world and how it changed things. But what is the first thing we think of when we hear the word Titanic?

That stupid Celine Dion song!!

Disaster Romance film is definitely a genre and Titanic spawned a number of movies that wanted to follow in its footsteps and capitalize on two markets at once. Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Twister, and other movies like it are all films that mixed romance films with disaster films and kept on thinking it was a good idea. And it’s all because everyone and their mother went to go see Titanic a couple trillion times to put it as one of the highest grossing films of all time.

Now to be fair, I will say I am letting my biases come out just a tad with my review of this movie so I must talk about some other good things in this film. The actors who played characters who actually existed and were real passengers of the Titanic did an absolutely phenomenal job. Bernard Hill plays Captain Edward John Smith, Kathy Bates played Molly Brown, Victor Garber played the ship’s builder Thomas Andrews, all very good performances. Now unfortunately Cameron doesn’t exactly stay true to all the historical characters, especially the First Officer William Murdoch who in real life displayed heroism and in the film ended up shooting a third class passenger… I will say that despite some inaccuracies, the actors they casted as these historical figures did a good job. The unfortunate thing is these characters are only window dressing to support the setting this love story is set in.

Furthermore, it’s not even that great of a love story. Your girlfriend might hate me for saying that but there have been and there will be better love stories than that of Jack and Rose. This romance probably would have been more believable if it hadn’t been bound to the confines of the Titanic narrative. Rose has three days to desperately fall in love with this handsome hobo from Wisconsin so much that she is willing to leave not only her asshole fiancé, but also her entire life and family, all within the timeline of the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking. If this had been a few weeks or something, I would have understood, but the Titanic hits the Iceberg 4 days after it departed from South Hampton. That is ridiculous!

Furthermore, the timeline of the Titanic doesn’t help the very development of Rose as a character. We know that at the end of the film, she is able to go off and do her own thing without feeling confined to the constructs of her class. But she goes from wanting to kill herself to having a sort of awakening at the end and branching out on her own. And that would have been a really powerful story of an empowered women if it wasn’t such a drastic change and it wasn’t because of Leonardo DiCaprio. Seriously, Rose goes from this milk toast rich girl to a milk toast beer drinking, spitting hick in a matter of days.

I first started to notice the holes in Titanic from a review a fellow critic did quite a while ago and he stated that if you put this story on a different boat, in a different time, you would get the same story and that you might as well call this movie Sinking Boat instead of Titanic. And I actually wouldn’t think that’s a horrible film. My issue comes when the movie is called Titanic but the events of the Titanic are secondary to the stupid Celine Dion love story.

This entire movie could have been about Victor Garber and his character Thomas Andrews. It could have been about Captain Smith, or Molly Brown. Hell I watched a documentary about the lawsuits that happened after the Titanic sank that would make for a fascinating courtroom drama. And yet Cameron decided to take the easy route and appeal to both fans of the romance genre and the disaster genre. And I understand that the Titanic has been romanticized quite a bit, in part due to this film, but I can’t help but feel this movie gets more recognition than it actually deserves.

And my bias comes back because that is my biggest gripe with this film. It took in so much money, taking its spot for highest grossing film of all time for so many years and yet I don’t feel like it deserved all that money. The optimist in me says people came for the technological spectacle instead of the romance, but even that depresses me because even films with the best CGI can suck because they don’t have a good story. Titanic and in the same vein, Avatar, doesn’t reward good storytelling, it rewards making the film look good. And Cameron has ridden that gravy train twice and wants to keep on riding it with Avatar sequel after Avatar sequel. He’s not a storyteller, he’s an event planner. He could be doing great films because he is a really good director, but instead he’s wasting his time with Avatar…

But I’m not talking about Avatar I’m talking about Titanic…

I am not a fan of Titanic, in case that wasn’t incredibly clear. Looking at it objectively, I can definitely point out the things that work. The visuals were spectacular, the casting was done really well, especially with the historical characters, and while I despise how much of this movie is more of an event than a story, I do have to compliment Cameron for how he marketed this film. Cameron didn’t just make a film about a horrible tragedy, he claimed that tragedy as his own. His film is now synonymous with the tragedy.

But everything else is just sappy or stupid. The romance overshadows a real life event when it should have been the other way around. The romance is not even that great, only being saved by two actors that just happened to have great careers after this movie, and while this movie is synonymous with the tragedy, so is that stupid Celine Dion song. I read something that said that that song was the 2^nd greatest tragedy to come out of the sinking of the Titanic.

I need to finish discussing this film. I’m glad that I finally sat down and we hashed out our differences. I can only walk away saying I did not like James Cameron’s Titanic. Plain and simple.

But what did you think? If you’re a fan of Titanic, why do you like it? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for other movies I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I’ll leave you with this. This is probably one of the douchiest parts of the movie. Enjoy!