A Titanic Production with a Storyline that Sinks

Rating: Null/10 (6 December 2010)

The main character, Rose (Kate Winslet), is a 17ish year old society girl setting sail on the luxurious Titanic to America with her extremely wealthy, handsome fiancé who adores her. What else could a girl want...or so you'd think. Well, inexplicably and unbelievably, our Rose believes that her life of luxury is just too boring for existence, so she decides to jump off the ship until Jack (Leo DiCaprio) talks her out of it. From here, you can see that a love story will unfold...
Rose soon learns that Jack is a dirty, struggling American artist who hangs around one-legged French prostitutes, and she becomes impressed with his obscene drawings of naked women. Why wouldn't she dump her rich, adoring fiancé for this guy? So how does the romance develop...? First, there's beer chugging, smoking and dancing at a raucous party held by the steerage class. Then, Rose takes Jack back to her room, rips off all her clothes and demands that he draw her naked. After Jack fails to take this as a hint that she's in heat, Rose drags Jack to the cargo deck where they have sex in the backseat of some stranger's car (how romantic)...and, appropriately enough this is when the shi! hits the fan...I mean the ship hits the iceberg.
The problem is that no carefully brought up girl in 1912 would behave this way. In that day and age, this would be throwing her life away just as if she jumped off the ship. Clearly, our Rose has a death wish because she also gives up a spot on a lifeboat choosing to go down with the ship, knowing that she will most likely freeze to death when she hits the water.
Despite the storyline and the poor acting, the movie was well produced. In all fairness, it's understandable why the studio went with this story. This was a huge budget production, and if this had been styled as a historical drama with young ladies behaving properly, it probably would not have had the box-office draw the studio needed. All in all, this was an entertaining and watchable movie (though unnecessarily long), but entirely over-rated.