Is it over yet...?

Rating: 3/10 (6 April 2004)

Titanic would have made for a perfectly acceptable hour-and-a-half film. The set design and costuming - all the period details, really - were fantastic, and the plot, albeit formulaic, at least held to Hollywood's general standard of mediocrity, and no worse than that. But where is it written that the length of a movie has to be relatively commeasurate to the vessel on which it is set? What this movie needed was a good editing - preferably by an editor armed with a chainsaw. Instead of settling for a passable 5-star, yea, even enjoyable 6-star historical romance, they shot for the moon - and produced an exercise in tedium and self-indulgence. I find it most noteworthy for the fact that it is the only movie in film history that ever managed to make me root for an iceberg. An unusual sensation, and no mean feat.