A mockery and a travesty of an incredible event in history

Rating: Null/10 (2 December 2002)

I love the story of the RMS Titanic. Love it so much that I myself cannot fully fathom why, so I've long since stopped questioning it, and went with it. I especially love the stories of the Titanic's people. God how I loved to hear people like Eva Hart, Ruth Becker Blanchard, Edith Brown Haisman, Milvina Dean...you name 'em, talking in a documentary or reading their various accounts. I was so enthusiastic about the Titanic, I wrote to the man who discovered her, Dr. Robert D. Ballard (yes, he replied, and answered my questions. Gee is he a nice person! :-) ) Yes, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Titanic buff. But I HATE, nay DETEST this movie. In fact, I consider it the ultimate example of Hollywood abomination of history. NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING can JUSTIFY what was done to the real history in the film, especially as it pertained to the most important element of it: the Titanic's real-life PEOPLE. Indeed, the beautiful recreation of the Titanic cut both ways in that it made the film an even worse travesty of history while being the only good thing about this clunker at the same time. The fictional characters are, in a word, awful. In fact, they are so awful as to be laughable. Jack Dawson, Calvin Hockley, Ruth and Rose DeWit Bukutor, Spicer Lovejoy...the whole lot of them are CARICTURES, not characters. (It was claimed that Jack and Rose "humanized" the Titanic saga. As Nero Wolfe would say, phooey! They didn't even come within screaming distance of humanizing the Titanic saga they were so awful.) What is more, while careful attention to detail was paid in the creation of the ship sets and other visual details, such attention also was a key part in making "Titanic" a double exploitation picture.
How's that? "Titanic" exploited the appeal of the Titanic story as well as the youth market by cutting open the real history of the Titanic story and plunking down a love story in it's place with a hot couple as the lead characters played by a hunk and a babe that were sure to win the attention of any and all teen (and non-teen) viewers. Thus, the film wound up being a Frankenstien monster. Profitable, to be sure, but still a Frankenstien monster. The beautiful recreation of the Titanic as she looked in her prime dramatically contrasting with the awful teen exploitation story set aboard her in place of the real history. Even worse, it was obviously known that if the film had a true to history depitction of the Titanic's real people in the background of the love story, it would distract from what was inteneded to be the film's bread and butter at the box office: Jack and Rose's romance. So a crass tactic was employed: misinterpretation and assasination of the characters of those like Captain Smith, First Officer Murdoch, Molly Brown, and others while downplaying to the hilt the actions of real-life heroes like Second Officer Lightoller, Marconi Marine operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, and Wallace Hartley and the other members of the Titanic's band, and even editing out those like Major Arthur Peuchen and Arthur Rostron, skipper of the valorus Titanic rescue ship, RMS Carpathia, just so Jack and Rose could stand out.
Especially Jack, the so-called "hero" of the story (Jack D. is the ULTIMATE awful "hero" in a bad story EVER, but I digress. What is more, the stories of all of the above real-life people-eithier individually, or combined-beat the living heck out of the contrived fictional characters and story in "Titanic" ANY day.) Not to mention how the tragic, unsavory, and controversial actions of the "ship that stood still" and didn't come to the Titanic's aid, the S.S. Californian, were bleached out entirely save for one (deleted) scene. In closing, no excuse, no matter how smoothly phrased, can expunge how this clunker so adroitly exploited the teen market as well as the appeal of the Titanic saga...and all at the expense of over 1,500 people who died in a lonely patch of ocean decades ago when a madien voyage they were enjoying went mad. DOWN with this guilded abomination of the Titanic saga and UP with the REAL history I say!