A Desperate Titanic Wanna-be

Rating: 1/10 (27 May 2001)

I'll start by saying that for quite a while I was looking forward to seeing this movie--that first teaser trailer blew me away, and just having seen that made me want to go out and see it. So I waited the months and the months until about a week before it came out, and I was reading some horrendous reviews from some of the finest critics out there. The one that made me go and see this movie was from Harry Knowles, who I usually tend to agree with about movies. So I went in expecting a fine film, and came out having seen a movie that is just about as bad a movie as you can get(with maybe the exception of Batman and Robin, or The Mummy Returns). The whole love story is wholly unoriginal and extrememly uninspired. Throughout the whole movie you just know what's going to happen next between Danny, Rafe, and Evelyn. I had the ending of the movie figured out almost right after the Pearl Harbor attack, which, for my money, is the highlight of the movie(the only highlight, by the way). The movie was WAAAAY too long(I got up to go to the bathroom twice, and didn't care at all that I missed some of the movie). Probably the finest performance of the movie was given by Leland Orser(the killer from the Bone Collector), the man that Evelyn saves in the hospital. John Schwartzmann's cinematography is excellent, as usual, as is Hans Zimmers score. I'm truly sad that the movie turned out the way that it did, because it had so many things going for it--an incredibly cinematic event, good actors(they're not great actors by any standard), a very cinematic director who COULD be great if he had the right script and the right producer, and a very accomplished composer. Unfortunately, it also has a VERY weak script from Randall Wallace, writer of Braveheart(who is blatantly ripping off James Cameron's Titanic here in almost every respect), terrible acting from almost all sides, and again it's length--and I usually love a 3-hour movie. But not here. This movie should have ended after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it couldn't do that--the studio heads have to sell this movie to the teenage girls who wouldn't know if this was historically accurate or not(it wasn't, for the most part). It makes me truly sad that this movie is going to be a huge moneymaker--I doubt if it will be the next Titanic, but it might make about 300 million or so. In closing, I'll just say that the only reason I would go to see this movie, or even recommend it, is the bombing sequence(or the first 25 minutes, at least). It is sad when a films visual effects are its finest accomplishment, but that is the sad fact here. God help the future of american cinema.