A Night to Remember at the Cinema

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2009)

Anyone who saw the old black & white movie "A Night to Remember" will appreciate the improved special effects in this one, but miss the more accurate portrayal of the historic event.
James Cameron really managed to bring the old ship back to life for the big screen, but at the same time he strayed from history, painting a negative and inaccurate picture of the crew and passengers.
I'm not referring to the fictitious love story between the two fictitious characters Kate and Jack. This addition is clearly pure invention, a device to involve the audience's emotions in the tragedy in a way that a documentary style film doesn't. That's fine. What's not fine to twist the historical facts about real people, which Cameron clearly does in this film. Many of the portrayals of the crew members are fictionalized. I suppose it's forgivable to make ordinary people into heroes, but to make heroes into villains, as this film does, is I think, unethical. It's damaging to the memory of those people, and I'm sure it's offensive to their surviving descendants.
The biggest misrepresentation is of 1st Officer Murdoch, who is portrayed as losing his mind and shooting passengers and himself during the sinking during the evacuation. In reality Murdoch did not shoot passengers or himself. The writers of the film completely made this up.
Captain Smith is portrayed as a weak, ineffectual human being incapable of making decisions. For me, Bernard Hill was wrongly cast in this role - he does not have the charisma and presence of Smith. According to most studies and records, Smith was also active until the very end. A one point he was calling back boats on his megaphone when he saw that they weren't full – a scene that was edited out of the movie for the final release.
I've always had mixed feelings about this film. The effects, sets, costumes and technical accuracy are impressive; as are some of the characters. I particularly like the chief engineer, and Murdoch; but there are aforementioned inaccuracies, and also many unnecessarily silly bits like the scene with Cal chasing Jack and Kate down the grand staircase with a gun, firing shots as he went, which cheapen the film.
I think that, when you make a film like this, dealing with such a monumental tragedy, with characters representing real people in recent history, it's very shameful to invent bad things about them.
But all in all this remains an epic film and was one of the most impressive films I'd ever seen at the cinema back when I first saw it in 1997.