Iceberg Right Ahead! A Review of Titanic (major spoilers)
by Joe Tracy, Publisher of Hollywood Lot Magazine

Have you ever had a gut feeling that a movie you were about to see was going to be the best one ever? That is the honest feeling I had when sitting down to view Titanic at a Press Screening in early December, 1997, at Paramount Pictures. I just knew that this would be the movie of all movies. I knew it would sweep the nation and all the movie award shows. I was ready for the experience.

So were my gut instincts right? Did this movie, that had been the most anticipated one ever for me to see, live up to all the hype? The answer is no. However, it could have easily been a yes.

According to James Cameron, Titanic is a love story. It seems that every interview Cameron conducts he is emphasizing that this is a "love story" and not a story about a ship. Ironically, as a love story Titanic fails miserably, but as a story about a ship it sails to new heights.

Titanic opens in modern times with a treasure hunter named Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) looking for a diamond that went down with Titanic. News of his search leads him to 101-year old Rose whom he flies out to the recovery and search site to learn her story. That takes us back to 1912.

The opening scenes in 1912 are very majestic. Cameron really captured the power of the ship preparing to leave Southampton. An old Renault car is loaded by crane as the thousands on the ship wave goodbye to the thousands on shore. Through many opening cuts you get a clear picture of just how enormous, majestic, and incredible the Titanic was during the ship’s maiden voyage. It is moments like these that really make the movie shine.

It’s not until we go inside the ship and get a true glimpse of Rose’s attitude (played by Kate Winslet) when the trouble begins. She is sitting at a table with her mother and other first class passengers eating dinner. She lights up a cigarette. "You know I don’t like that," says her mother. Rose’s response is to blow the cigarette smoke into her mother’s face.

This is the type of character that Cameron wants us to love and feel for -- a rebellious brat. What type of follow-ups do we get to that act? How about spitting, flipping off people she does not like, and begging Jack to paint her nude "like one of your French girls." Even her lover, Jack (Leonardo DeCaprio) tells her in the movie that she is a "spoiled brat." I got the same impressions. The ingredients to Cameron’s "love story" is spoiled first class brat meets third class theif (oh, yeah, he "borrowed" the jacket) for a love infatuation.

This is how ridiculous it gets. After a scene where Rose lets Jack paint her nude, it comes back to modern times where those she is telling the story to apparently want to know if she "did it" with him. She says "no, he was much too professional" than that. So much for professionalism and honor because just a few short minutes later they are in back of the Renault car on Titanic, making love! "Put your hands on me, Jack" she pleads. Instead of developing a story of love based on romance, Cameron develops it on infatuation and dishonor (except for three scenes).

The scenes of Jack joining first class and Rose joining third class are excellent. It is these type of scenes that help move the story along and build the relationship. So is the scene where Jack shows her how to "fly." Unfortunately, that’s all we get. The rest of this so-called "love story" doesn’t even come close and gets so bad that at one point I almost wished Rose had jumped off the Titanic so that the movie could have properly moved forward.

The problem with Titanic was not the acting. I thought that all the acting was great and that all the characters interacted with the proper chemistry. The problem with Titanic is what James Cameron perceives to be a 1912 love story, which is nothing more than a 1997 teenage infatuation. There is no creativity and little romance. It's just giddy school children running around a ship going into places they shouldn’t be. Jack even steals a jacket and hat that he later claims to have just borrowed. Um, yeah. If he had just "borrowed" it, why hadn’t he returned it yet?

Cameron seems to have forgotten what was socially known in 1912. Contrary to the movie, using the middle finger to flip people off (as Rose did) was not yet part of society’s culture. Perhaps Cameron thinks that Rose invented it! It is scenes like this that modernize the main characters and take away from the charm and reality of the 1912 time period and in effect ruin what could have been a great film.

At one point in the movie Rose tells Jack it is over. Everything looks bleak. How will Cameron solve this dilemma? He solves it by having Rose run to Jack and say "hello Jack, I changed my mind." What type of creative solution is that?

Throughout the movie, Cameron builds this "I jump, you jump" mentality between the two characters where one will not leave without the other. You jump, I jump. You die, I die. You live, I live. This mentality is very strong between the two characters, especially with Rose. Near the end, Rose is clinging to wreckage and Jack is freezing in the water. Jack makes Rose promise that she will live. She promises. However, she does not make him promise the same thing in return! The mentality has suddenly just been tossed aside even though it was strong enough for her to jump out of a life boat and risk death to be with him!

Through the whole last half of the movie Jack and Rose are wading through freezing water (inside the ship - and they weren’t even shivering afterwards) and still have plenty of energy to endure the final plunge and, for Rose, to be the ONLY one in the water that lives. Add that to the fact that a frozen Rose can swim to another location to grab a whistle from a dead frozen crew member and even blow it! This is wonder woman in a scene that is about as believable as the little girl in The Lost World who does a gymnastics routine in a run-down shed to kill a Raptor. I won’t even mention the scene where she closes her eyes while swinging an ax to successfully free Jack from handcuffs!

There were some characters, however, that were absolutely great and convincing. The character that really shines in Titanic is Molly Brown (Kathy Bates). Cameron makes sure we don’t see enough of her, however, so that we can see Jack teach Rose to spit so that she can spit in her fiancé's face later in the movie (Cal, played by Billy Zane). Had more time been spent on characters like Molly Brown or a more romantic development of the main characters, then Titanic would have been much more enjoyable.

Titanic does have its shining moments. After the ship hits the iceberg, the drama and believability of the movie picks up considerably and Cameron’s strengths really start to shine. It does, in fact, show qualities of that "epic adventure" that Fox, Cameron, and Paramount had been promising. We see more of what the people on Titanic had to deal with and how preferential treatment was handed out to the various classes by the crew. We see more of the ship, the crew, and the passengers and have to deal less with the waning love story thrusted upon us. Thus it becomes very ironic that Cameron is touting Titanic as a love story when that is the only part that anchors the movie from being an epic adventure.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of space giving prime examples of how Cameron’s "love story" fails in my opinion. Quite the opposite is the effects, artistry, cinematography, and costuming of Titanic. All of these are every bit as epic as promised and turn what could have been a major flop into a decent film (I use "decent" loosely). From the flight scenes to Titanic leaving Southampton and the orchestra to the sinking, Titanic is as good as it gets. In all these scenes I was caught up in the adventure and was in awe of every moment. None of these scenes left me disappointed. Hopefully Cameron’s perfectionism for artistry and realistic effects will become a standard in the industry. He is to be greatly commended.

So that brings us to the end. Rose doesn’t make Jack promise to live (like he made her -- so much for "you jump, I jump") so we get to see her say her goodbye to him and unleash his dead body to sink into the ocean’s depth. She’s rescued and makes it to Carpathia only to hide from her fiancé who knows that his diamond is in her jacket. So apparently she plays dead to her mother, fiancé, and others as she lies about her name to a Carpathia crew member and does who-knows-what without any money once she reaches New York. By the end of the movie, all three main characters have died. Jack dies in the water, Cal shoots himself with a gun (not shown, told by the Old Rose as happening during the Wall Street crash) and old Rose dies in her sleep on the recovery vessel, thus "joining" Jack (amazingly enough as the young Rose) in the final scene of "dead people come back to life." The whole end fell apart like it too had hit an iceberg.

When all is said and done Titanic is a great success and a major failure. Its audience reach was absolutely phenomenal with most people being able to look beyond all the major problems and development issues. Those people I envy as Titanic was not a movie I could enjoy all the way through even though I wanted to with all my heart. The problems annoyed me and it is now clear, more than ever, that there is yet to be a movie on the Titanic (oh, yeah, this was a "love story") that is to be done right. The arena is still wide open.

Faults of the movie aside, Cameron is a good director and excellent producer. The issue of the movie shouldn’t be "how much money was spent?" or "did he yell at his cast/crew?", but rather "did he get the job done effectively?" And in many instances the answer is "yes". Cameron is one of only three directors/producers I know that could have pulled off a movie of this magnitude. Yet even looking back Cameron states, in Newsweek, that "today if he’d known what it would take to bring his vision to the screen he’d have stopped before he started."

Kudos to Cameron, Digital Domain, and the rest of the cast/crew who pulled together such a major production. Although the whole movie wasn’t perfect, there were definitely parts that were perfect.

I recognize that many people will have an opposite opinion of what I've presented here and call the love story as "epic" as the rest of the movie. I envy those people because they were able to enjoy the whole film where I could only enjoy half of it. While Titanic swept the Academy Awards, in the four award ceremonies prior to the Golden Globes (Boston Society of Film Critics, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review) Titanic faired very poorly, which is apparently reflective of the mixed feelings many people had towards this epic adventure. But that didn't slow down this greatest achievement of Cameron's career from becoming the highest grossing movie of all time. And for that, he deserves kudos.