Big. Hollywood.

Rating: Null/10 (12 March 2003)

Titanic was a throwback, in a way, to the big, sweeping Hollywood epic. No, it may not have been the best movie in the year when it won Best Picture, but arguably neither was Gone With The Wind the year it won (and, adjusted for inflation, GWTW still trounces Titanic's box office numbers).

I must confess to a bit of a bias. My mother was a Titanic buff long before the movie came out, and the first time I saw it was with her. I knew all the stories -- I recognized Herbert Lightoller, the third officer and senior surviving crew member; Harold Bride, the assistant Marconi operator who sent some of the first, if not the very first, SOS messages; and, of course, Maggie Brown, whom no one called Molly until the musical came around long after her death.
When we saw the movie, Mom was almost in tears, and not in the places where Jim Cameron intended. She told me later that she'd seen well-staged portrayals of the Titanic sinking, but this was the first time she'd seen a convincing vision of it *sailing.* Hail CGI.
The first time I saw Titanic, the spectacle was so impressive that I didn't notice the wooden dialogue, the pointless side-plots, the uneven pacing, and the limp tin-whistle score that culminated in (saints preserve us) Celine Dion over the closing credits.
I was awed the first time I saw it, on the big screen in the plush theater seats, but it loses much of its charm in a second viewing on a threadbare couch with a small screen. I'm tempted to do one of those guerilla editing jobs, cut the Rose/Jack business down to a minimum, and take the movie down to about two hours, That's something I could watch over and over.

As it is, I have the 4:3 and widescreen versions of the movie. Mom was a collector, and like many with that affliction, strove for completeness. One of everything. On the rare occasions I'm tempted to watch it, I thump the fast-forward button like an epileptic Morse code operator.

How great is Titanic? That depends on your definitions. If you're looking for its imact on an uncritical and awed audience, its greatness is in line with its box office. If you're looking for something that holds up under repeated, even compulsive viewing, it isn't in the Citizen Kane/Casablanca league.