A North Atlantic carp

Rating: 7/10 (6 September 1999)

First of all, `Titanic' was, on the whole and all things considered, a good movie. There have been much sillier Best Picture awards handed out over the years. I'll go through the basic drill as quickly as possible ... Yes, the Titanic was HUGE - Titanic, as they say - and astounding to watch; yes, the musical score was intolerable, synthesised, neo-Celtic syrup; yes, Kate Winslet was gorgeous and, at one point, naked; yes, the story was pleasant, but pretty thin for three hours. Have I covered everything? Probably not, but I want to move on to complain about the very end. The final few minutes contain footage that is just so manifestly stupid, so completely unnecessary, so obviously witless, that even if it's not enough to ruin the movie, James Cameron ought never be allowed to hear the end of it. The trouble is that I can't lodge my complaint without giving some stuff away. So I feel obliged to issue a
WARNING
to those people, wherever they may be, who have not yet seen `Titanic' - which I hope they will ignore. Go on. Have a peek. It can't REALLY hurt you to know what you're in for. It's not me, but James Cameron, who wants to lull you into quiescence for three hours and then hit you over the head with a big stupid mackerel. -That said, I'll issue a
SECOND WARNING
before getting down to business.
My complaint is in two parts:
(1) A good deal of interest was supplied as we watched the diamond change hands throughout the movie, wondering where it would end up when the ship finally sank. Well, it ends up - this is your last chance to stop reading - in Rose's hands. She keeps it. In fact she has it on her person seventy-something years later when she heads out into the Atlantic to meet the salvagers. Then she wanders out to the railing one night and tosses it into the ocean. WHY toss it into the ocean? If she doesn't need the money, then the poor sods who invested heavily in order to find the diamond probably do - why not give THEM the diamond? And what RIGHT does she have to effectively destroy this historical heirloom, former property of Louis XIV? Clearly Cameron thought that, having made such heavy weather of the diamond early on, he needed to do something with it at the end, and he thought that throwing it into the sea would be very fine and dramatic. Dramatic fiddlesticks.
(2) Rose finally dies at a ripe old age and goes to a kind of heavenly Titanic where she is re-united with her true love, Jack. But hang on. She's been married for several DECADES to some other bloke, who presumably has SOME claim on her affections in the afterlife. I bet there'll be an awkward moment on the HMS Celestial Titanic when HE shows up. But over-glorifying her (no doubt genuine) love for Jack is the least of it. Why the sudden dive into the supernatural? One minute, we're in the material universe with the rest of the human race; the next, we're up in the sky somewhere. I'm surprised they didn't give us a shot of Cal Hockley stoking the boilers in Hell. (I've heard some people run the defence that this is all just a dream. This strikes me as a strained interpretation; and even if it's the right interpretation, it's a poor defence. Dreams are dramatically irrelevant. At least, this one is.)
These two complaints aren't trivial: they're illustrative of a more general problem. The wondrous spectacle of `Titanic' is more than twice undercut by Cameron's facile theatrics. Still - big ship, adolescent love, Kate Winslet, lots of water, and all that.