Good but not great.

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2002)

I personally found the movie to be extremely well done from a technical perspective, meaning: effects, sound, camera work, etc. However, I felt that the acting was forced--the accents being some of the worst I've heard since Costner tried his hand at Robin Hood--and the script was atrocious--more resembling the banter of modern high school students than what I would expect out of an early 20th century debutante and orphaned pauper. Cameron may be an exceptional director, but he's no writer.
Of course there are many that would disagree, but I think that most of this movie's more staunch defenders have simply allowed themselves to be lulled into complacency by the stunning visuals and the "feel-good" love story. I admit that the movie does evoke a warm and fuzzy feeling if you allow yourself some suspension of disbelief, but for the pickier among us (we like to think of ourselves as having a more "discerning" or "refined" sense of taste) it simply fell short of being a "great" movie.
I personally found the circumstances of the "love story" between Jack and Rose to be exceptionally contrived. How did Jack manage to get himself from being a poor orphan in the Midwest, to a starving artist in Europe? How convenient for him that Rose was a being forced into an unwanted marriage to "save her family" thus providing him a perfect opportunity into her pants...err..heart... The bottom line is that this particular love story would have been fine in a less pretentious movie, but this was a 200 million dollar reenactment of a horrible tragedy brought about by hubris, "God himself couldn't sink this ship," and exacerbated by classism. Not exactly the proper venue for an exposition on teenage rebelliousness and hormones...