Very Good, But Not Great

Rating: 8/10 (29 March 2000)

Titanic is one of the few movies in recent times on which the film academy and the public seemed to agree. It won more Oscars than any other movie but Ben Hur, and had a box office take that topped even the first Star Wars movie. So you'd expect it to be the greatest movie of all time.
Unfortunately, it isn't. It's certainly a very good movie. It has great special effects (though, if that's what you're looking for, the Star Wars movies and Jurassic Park are better). And it brought home the magnitude of the Titanic disaster (when in recent times have we had a single disaster that killed 1500 people?). And it has a haunting theme song. But it fell short of what it could have been.
The situation of the movie was an immensely interesting one: You have a ship that's going down in icy waters. There's no rescue in sight. There aren't nearly enough life boats. So it's inevitable that a lot of people are going to die in a rather unpleasant way, and they know this for over an hour before it happens. How would people react in a situation like that?
This is the sort of thing that fiction could never tell you. You can probably figure out that some people would be heroic while others would be cowardly, that some would be selfless while others would be selfish. But most interesting of all are the reactions you'd never expect. And, to the extent that the movie told those real life stories, it was excellent.
Unfortunately, the real life stories were obscured by a fictional plot which bore an uncomfortable similarity to "Romeo and Juliet" and which employed so many stereotypes that it was hard to take it seriously. (Virtually ALL of lower class passengers, e.g., are portrayed as coarse but good-hearted people, while nearly all of the upper class passengers are portrayed as selfish snobs.)
Even with its flaws, I'd still recommend seeing this movie, if you haven't already. But, with all of its Oscars and with its record setting box office take, I feel compelled to add a caution: It's NOT the best movie of all time, as you might expect it to be from the hype!