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I'm glad I saw it before the hype machine kicked into High Gear. It was supposed to be a big, fat, flop by the way ... up until the day it was released.
Being the Titanic buff I am, I saw it opening day. And I probably saw it four more times in theaters. It's not a great film. Leo DiCaprio sucks in it ... and I happen to know he can act. Imagine how much money it would have made from the teen girl crowd if he were actually not loathesome on screen.
To get through the vapid story, I have to imagine it being told purposefully in the melodrama style of the historical period being featured. In a great bit of thread hijack cross-referencing, this is not unlike giving The Dark Knight the benefit of the story doubt by viewing it as purposefully chaotic.
But that's how I deal with it. Billy Zane's crazy eyebrows in for twirling moustache. Silly class-clash love story where, in the white's-only world of the period, the lad from steering isn't an actual Irishman, but a more acceptable American boy down on his luck) And the plucky gal (Kate Winslet far more appealing than her co-star) exhibiting signs of wink-wink anachronisms to tell the audience she's so ahead of her time, she's gabba-gabba one of us. Yes, I have to do a lot of mental acrobatics to enjoy the film.
But I want to enjoy it. It's a visually luscious retelling of one of my favorite true-life stories. I can also pretend the fictional love story is one of the thousands of unknown tales that went down with the ship. And I forgive the fictionalization for the sake of having protagonists who will go down to the flooded decks, then up above, then down again, up again, and down again. No real persons did that. And so I accept it as a dramatic license to show what was going on below decks at various stages of the sinking. That's where the excitement is ... but no real person who experienced that excitement lived to tell about it.
Oddly, one thing about the movie that bugged me was the last time they went below the water line and were up on deck again a moment later. That seemed a wasted trip ... until the re-release DVD came out with deleted scenes ... among then a fantastic bit of the lovers being chased by David Warner through the main dining room as it sinks underwater. It's a fantastic scene ... and I think it plugs a leaky hole (to use an appropos pun) in the movie.
Visually, the film presents the Titantic in as authentic a mode as we will ever see. Historically, I'd say the accuracy is an acceptable 85%, with dramatic license used liberally to include unconfirmed items of "legend" that likely didn't happen.
The below decks and actual sinking excitement are done really well. But the love story and bookends story ultimately leave me cold, and I feel little human tragedy when the ship sinks and people die. I think I actually cheer when DiCaprio dies.
Conversely, though it's played a little cornball, the sinking in A Night to Remember invariably leaves me in tears. Of the thousands of stories that might be told, I think this film is wise to focus on the most compelling ones ... the story of the ship's crew under unbelievably dramatic duty-calls situations.
Um, in Star Trek, the stories are not about the passengers. Aboard ship, the crew are the prime characters ... especially when disaster strikes.
Like I said elsewhere, the two films make for a great double feature ... each filling in the deficits of the other.
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