Only to be Idolized by Starry Eyed Tweens

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2007)

Titanic {dir. James Cameron, 1997} (*½/****)
Somewhere on its way to becoming the all time box office champion and biggest Oscar winner of all time, James Cameron's Titanic etched out a place in my mind as the one film that can most easily send me into a frenzied rant against the dangers of big- budget, epic film making. Sure, I might not have put it that way when I first saw it (I was seven) but, upon first viewing I knew that this film was nothing special. Four years later, I was able to identify it as simply money thrown onto the screen with little room left for intelligence, emotion or character. Yet even as I professed the evils of this production and its vapid screenplay (penned by director Cameron), there were those who maintained that Titanic was an achievement. Among those people are esteemed film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert , both of whom included it on their top ten lists of 1997. Those celebratory citations led me to revisit Titanic again recently, for the first time on DVD, a disc which preserves the film's original aspect ratio and presents the clearest available picture and sound. The Verdict: As the old truism goes, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig."
The film isn't all bad; the cast is solid (considering the material..but more on that later), the score is rich, the cinematography is evocative and the production design and visual effects are impeccable. Yet as it turns out, all these elements do not a great film make. Titanic's greatest weakness lies at its very core: the screenplay. It reaches a level so wretched that I will be blunt in my metaphoric criticism. Cameron's script isn't just a turd, it is a floater; it refuses to just be flushed away to haunt us no longer. It insists on having an epic length and employing a framing device that may very well be the cause of a sudden onset of narcolepsy. I'm sorry to resort to such infantile comparison, but I believe that is best to convey the utter insult that is Cameron's screenplay. I consider myself a romantic, yet the so-called romance of this film left me cold, with nothing to do except roll my eyes. The film lacks any new vision or originality, and that can never be commended.
I'm fed up at this point; three viewing, each one revealing an un-plundered area of Cameron's incompetence. This film remains an interminable, and wildly popular, mash of tired formula only be idolized by starry eyed tweens.