The Second Worst Movie Ever

Rating: 1/10 (7 April 2005)

The first time I commented on this movie, I gave it a really harsh review. Since then, nothing has changed, but I'm going easier this time.
Two titles come to mind when reviewing it: "Natural Born Killers" (NBK) and "Gone with The Wind" (GwTW). Till "Titanic", the worst and the second worst movies I've ever seen. NBK is by far the worst. It has an excellent director, a good writer, good to very good actors and, even so, it managed to be completely empty, with some spectacular sequences gone completely to waste in meaningless situations (like the wonderful gray-scale prison sequence). GwTW is another meaningless work, but it never had any chance, with terrible speeches, a director that didn't know what he was doing and a story that would have thrown it into oblivion if it was not settle in the American civil war (it has some "historical value", or so I was told).
Back to "Titanic", the first obvious problem is the plot. At one side, there is this young lady, about to get married to a rich man, an educated pig, but still a pig. On the other side, there is that young man, handsome, good-hearted and a gifted artist. The only problem is that the young artist is poor, but, mind you, the lady is rich already! It was absolutely impossible for her to not fall in love with the artist. The only conflict possible is the jealousy of the rich man against the poor artist. Predictable, to say the least. Then, when everybody have fallen for the new happy couple, the ship sinks. I'm absolutely sure that people wouldn't have cried so much if everybody had died. The whole story is extremely predictable. Worse, it is made predictable.
How did "Titanic" take the second place from GwTW? Well, it took a lot of cash to do that... Cameron wanted a real sized ship to be able to effectively send it to the bottom. Fine, it's not my money. Then we see the result on the big screen, and now it is our money! Since "Indiana Jones 3", I hadn't seen such a lousy chroma-key. When you see the passengers falling into the sea, it looks like they were filmed against a projection, like in the original "King Solomon's Mines" movie. That alone, I wouldn't have minded so much. Then you watch Cameron commenting on the box-office success of "Titanic" and his claim that it was due to his attention to details... Even if that statement was true, there is one more problem: the big things are all wrong, why care about the details?
It was not easy to put the about four hours "Gone with The Wind" on third place, but Cameron made it possible in about three hours. He has a talent for blockbusters, it's too bad he cannot also make them good movies.