Delighted to find so many fellow Titanic-bashers

Rating: 5/10 (10 May 2000)

The only good thing about this movie are the special effects (truly incredible!), including the underwater scenes. What else does it have? Let's see:
One of the worst screenplays ever put on film.
One-dimensional, dull, trite characters who are either improbably admirable (our lovely Rose can appreciate Picasso, knows all about Dr. Freud, and can figure out that there aren't enough lifeboats for all the passengers!) or ridiculously evil (Cal, the guy played by Billy Zane). Not to mention tiresome cliches of the noble poor vs the ignoble rich.
Leonardo di Caprio, basically modeling instead of acting. Kate Winslet doing a more decent job, but nowhere near her performance in "Sense and Sensibility" where she was given a real character to play.
The only emotion generated by this movie came from knowing that more than 1,200 people actually did die on the Titanic. And even the disaster scenes weren't nearly as affecting as they should have been -- because the lives and deaths of thousands became merely a backdrop to the romance between Kate and Leo (sorry, Rose and Jack) and the question of whether they would survive. (Personally, I found myself wishing they had both drowned early in the movie when Rose tried to jump and Jack was going to jump after her.)
If you want to see a GOOD movie about the Titanic, rent "A Night to Remember." It was made, I think, in 1948 and obviously had very poor special effects by today's standards, but it did an incomparably superior job of telling the story of the ship and its passengers. (By the way, the only good bits of dialogue in "Titanic" -- the conversations between the crew when they realize the ship is going to sink -- are basically lifted from that film.) Wisely, "A Night to Remember" doesn't focus on a couple of central characters and instead shows us many different people, who are much more fully fleshed out in the small vignettes they get than Jack and Rose were in all those unbearable hours of screen time. In that way, "A Night to Remember" truly captures the human tragedy of what happened.
The fact that "Titanic" won the Best Picture award in a year that saw such superb films as "LA Confidential" and (one of my all-time favorites) "Boogie Nights" just shows the cowardice of the Academy and the marketing power of 13-year-old girls.