Screen play might have been written by socio-political ideologues

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2001)

Little to add to previous full length descriptions.Otherwise,the whole resolves itself into two headings: The story.
The history.
After a short time I had the feeling of a soap-opera of forbidden love,which might have occurred in Ancient Athens,Shakespeare's England or the Wild West.There is some viciousness..Cal's demands on his fiancee,and his brutal slap across her face;the way in which his bodyguard, a "heavy" ,Lovett,gives the handcuffed Dawson a crippling blow to the stomach: this is the stuff of a bad Western.Neither is the idea of Cal shooting off his automatic in a crowded hallway realistic nor does it add anything to the plot except perhaps to indicate a fragment of character.With little exception, these seem to be mono-dimensional characters. In fact,tri-dimensionsality seems to be far from the skills of the director or main characters,apart perhaps from that of the heroine's mother,from whom we get some idea of her past,present and anticipated future.They say their lines,gesture,grimace, and act,but we know rather little about them. There are obvious and predictable "cliff-hangers",one earlier,which brings the juvenile leads together: later an attempt to escape the pursuing Atlantic floods,which could equally have been a pursuit by prehistoric beasts in "Jurassic Park'-a film which is also short on character and plot. While some details are accurate: British handcuffs,(not the US ratchet type)UK Webley revolver,the cup of lemon and weak tea served to the Captain raises some eyebrows;obviously an old seadog would have had strong tea with milk and sugar.Again, the string quintet played "Nearer my God to Thee" to the US tune of Lowell Mason's 1856 "Bethany",while English musicians would have been more familiar with Dykes' (1823-76) "Horbury" in Hymns Ancient and Modern.Perhaps the director had US cinema audiences in mind. The story also aggravates class hostility of the time; I would wonder whether the crew would deliberately exclude the less privileged classes from safety.
History. The film puts total liability on the class-deferent British:insufficient lifeboats; arrest of Dawson on false charges;handcuffing in a sinking vessel;closing off the lower hatches at the risk of the engine crew.I may have missed the 16 watertight compartments,of which five were ruptured, and the double hull. Once more, the Leyland liner "Californian" is omitted (US?)-less than 20 mi.away,and her radio operator asleep.(Encycl.Britannica,vol 22).There is no follow-up of the International Convention for safety held in London.
There is no doubt about the cinematic thaumaturgy,the amazing computer effects,the marvelous shots of the liner and some tricks like a color equivalent of the Dunning Process(placing actor in distant filmed background).They fail to compensate for a seaborne soap opera and I would have chosen a Grant-Bergman film for a romantic drama,and Das Boot" for a taut aquatic drama. In short,the wreck and the romance don't fit.