Sinking fast...

Rating: 2/10 (26 April 2007)

... and yet not nearly fast enough. When this movie first splashed onto the big screen, I was in the middle of the prime target: young, teenaged girls who all too easily swooned over the new "it" guy, Leo, and wanted a taste of "adult" love. Thank heavens I somehow missed it on that round, only to have one of my friends pull it out nearly a decade (has it really been so long?) later for a girl's night. I was stunned. The hype created by the Oscars and gushing of my peers set this movie on a pinnacle from whence the movie plummeted to the bottom of the ocean to join its namesake. If only they had left the story there.
The first TWO HOURS were spent dilly-dallying aimlessly along the ship following Rose,a girl who is deprived a life by her dominating fiancée, her conniving mother, and ultimately her own self. She goes back and forth from suicidal to "equal rights" to "you are not of my element" with schizophrenic dexterity. I have great admiration for Kate Winslet, but this character was gratingly awful to watch. Mr. DiCaprio was little more than a pretty face during the movie. His lack of drive proves him not a knight in shining armor, but meh, he's just not as bad as the villain. And somehow, they fall madly into doomed love because *gasp* the ship is going to sink! So now, the ship has fiiiiinally begun to sink, but wait! You still have another HOUR to watch the main people get stuck, cut to people drowning, oh wait Rose and Jack are safe, cut to more drowning. Oh wait, the ships still sinking, so Rose and Jack aren't safe again, oh they're safe, wait no..... DIE ALREADY! So after three hours, Rose finally says I'll never let go! upon which she immediately lets go and is magically found unfrozen in a colony of frozen solid bodies. Yes, its amazing how it goes.
So why 2 stars? I'll chalk it up to the romantic notion behind the ship, which has managed to still fascinate people a century later. The recreation of detail was admittedly stunning, although I got just as much out of a Titanic mystery computer game. Normally, even if I don't care for a movie, I'd say knock yourself out if you still wanna see it, but at 3 painful hours long, I'd definitely go with a no.