Why I like this film, as a longtime student of the actual Titanic

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2004)

A fellow reviewer wrote earlier that Titanic is among his or her favorite films, and sometimes people laugh. I myself laugh, not at the movie but at that statement. I echo what the reviewer said, which is that at the time, almost everyone loved the movie or at least recognized good stuff about it. It was critically acclaimed, made more money than any movie in history, and received uncountable awards including the most Oscars ever, tied with Ben Hur at 11 wins.
Now, I shake my head when I see that Titanic currently has a rating of about 6.7. Jeez people, view a movie for how it is rather than how oversaturated it got!!!
And that's the problem. Titanic WAS a very good movie- and since I was interested in the actual ship a decade before the movie was made, hopefully I can tell you why I support it. The technical achievements alone were grand, the scale of the movie was epic and moving, and to James Cameron's credit, it was almost 100% accurate to the many different details of the Titanic legend. Of course, to accept this one has to ignore the fact that the main characters are fictitious amalgams of real Titanic passengers.
Those two characters are Jack Dawson and Rose Buttaker, played of course by the leads Dicaprio and Winslet. Their awkward meeting and subsequent falling in love is played against the oncoming disaster, which, as everyone should know, happened 4 days into the ship's first voyage. At 11:40pm on April 14, 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank 2 and a half hours later.
Now for the movie itself. The acting, although passionate, is goofy at times due to a script that was much maligned as being stereotypical and bland. I don't hate it that much, it doesn't sound too far off from what people are like when they're stupid in love. However, my problem arises here: Rose seems to be witty and independent, yet she becomes a doe-eyed child when she falls for Jack, who seems to know the answer to everything and even needs to heroically command Rose to "get back" when the iceberg comes by. More and more their relationship turns from possible to downright one-dimensional, as Jack becomes a grand hero and Rose becomes a helpless damsel. Granted, each character has scenes where they betray that limit (Rose in fact saves Jack's life at one point), but that's an exception to the rule. Another problem is that, quite simply, a relationship between a first class woman and third class male is possible, although entirely improbable. People just weren't that open minded in 1912, although for this movie it doesn't seem too severely hard to swallow.
That having been said, I don't have much of a problem with the rest of the movie. This is because it stays admirably close to the facts, and pays insane amounts of detail to each scene. Director Cameron was in fact often joked about due to his fierce, almost anal commitment to the details. The ship looks real, because most of it is. The band played until the very end, which they really did. The ship indeed broke in half at the 2nd funnel, and if you look close, the iceberg scrape actually dots and dents the ship's hull instead of tearing a solid gash, as it actually did in real life. Although the 1958 Titanic film "A Night to Remember" had no fictitous characters and sticks religiously close to what really happened, James Cameron's Titanic is technically the most accurate, especially due to the breaking of the ship which wasn't proven until after the former film was made. A couple technical slips do get by, such as a terrible blue screen effect seen when the drunken baker is standing atop the risen stern (just before the final sinking). There's a shot of victims rolling down the upright stern section near the end, and we can see one of them bounce off of the cylindrical capstans, obviously a soft prop. But hey, these are just gaffes in an otherwise very good technical achievement.
In closing, I still like this movie, as I did when it first came out (though not nearly as much now, after a dozen viewings). It has a lot of emotional impact, it stays very, very close to the actual facts, and it can even be argued that although fictional, Jack and Rose are just an example of what really happened to many of the couples on the real ship when it went down. I don't think a better movie about the Titanic can be made, although the aforementioned "Night to Remember" is also extremely good and in many ways just like James Cameron's film. If you see Titanic, the film, for what it tried to achieve, you can see that it is in fact a well made and successful film. I know it's hard to get past the negativity that its oversaturation caused, but at its heart I think it is an excellent movie.