Pathetic, high-budget, glorified version of Love Boat

Rating: 1/10 (11 October 2000)

As normal, I break with most people I know, since they generally loved this movie. I didn't like it at all, for a large number of reasons.
First of all, it was too long. They showed detail in scenes that did not need detail, and even within the movie, they re-hashed scenes multiple times. In fact, it almost felt like the second half of the movie was a poorly-done sequel to the first half of the movie. In the first half, we saw way too much detail about the 'daily life' on the ship, most of which I found boring and not worthy of my time to watch. In the second half, we saw a 90 minute pseudo-documentary of the sinking of the Titanic, an event which even in real life only took 2 hours. So basically, James Cameron showed us almost every single minute of the sinking. This is poor from a technical dramatic standpoint. Good drama glosses over the boring, nitty-gritty details, to focus on the important stuff. Cameron decided to show the nitty-gritty details with as much care and attention as the important sequences. Some interpret this as "great attention to detail." I don't see it that way. I see it as boring depiction of events that are neither relevant to the plot nor worthy of my time to witness.
This brings us to my second complaint about this movie: the plot. Basically, this was a glorified, very expensive version of the old TV show "The Love Boat." Indeed, most episodes of "Love Boat" that I can recall were of a higher caliber, plot-wise and dialog-wise, than this movie was. I thought the dialog was forced, and stale, and did not "ring true" at all. Cameron was too "present" in the movie -- that is, I felt that he was forcing the characters to do exactly what he wanted, rather than having events take their "natural" course. Probably, this is because he was depicting something based in truth (the sinking of the Titanic), and so he had no choice about where the overall story would end up (the ship sinks -- I assume this is not a spoiler for anyone, heh heh). Thus, he had to force the part of the story that leads up to the sinking in a certain direction, and he did this in a poor manner that was too blatant, and made the whole thing seem artificial.
I also thought both the principle actors (Kate Winslett, Leo DiCaprio) turned in terrible performances. I didn't really believe in either of them. Worse yet, they annoyed me, and their characters really irritated me. This is a terrible flaw in a disaster movie: if you dislike the characters to which the disaster (in this case, the sinking of the ship) is going to happen, then you really don't care whether they live or die. In fact, I was actually rooting for BOTH of them to die, because by the end of the film, they had irritated me enough that it was the only way I thought I'd get any satisfaction.
I will admit that the film had excellent special effects. Normally, I like special effects movies. I even don't mind ones that openly, honestly have no interest in plot, characters, or story. However, Titanic had none of those things except special effects, but tried to pretend like it did. It's that presumptuousness that really irritated me. The movie so blatantly lavish, scenes were so clearly done "just to show they could do it," that I could sense the arrogance of Cameron and the entire cast and crew in every scene.

This movie was a big waste of more than 3 hours of my time. My rating: 1/10.