Visually Impressive, Intellectually Insulting

Rating: Null/10 (3 December 2002)

Spoilers! Ah Titanic, the most expensive movie of all time - and the most overrated. Let's look at the ingredients:

An incredibly trite love story. The "romance" in this film comes off like a dumbed-down version of Romeo and Juliet, but with Extra Added Cliche(tm). As tales of forbidden love go, this one is pretty boilerplate and pandering. Rose's fiance is a smarmy twit so we don't mind that she screws around on him - wouldn't want to make the audience uncomfortable or challenge them in any way. If you want to see a film with the same sort of "forbidden love" scenario, but with exponentially better execution, you just have to look at the previous year's Best Picture recipient - "The English Patient".

Incredibly dull performance by the lead actors. Honestly, I've seen high school productions of Romeo and Juliet where the leads made you care more about the characters than Winslet and DiCaprio do in Titanic. In fact, the best performances of the film come from the supporting cast - especially Kathy Bates, Billy Zane, and James Warner. At least neither of the leads won Oscars.

Just plain annoying story. Perhaps the most irritating part of this film is the endless scenes (at least, they felt endless) sequence where Rose rescues Jack and they're trying to escape from the bowels of the ship. And what happens next? Jack dies. When I saw this in theaters, there were people crying at this point - but all I could think about was how pointless the previous sequence was. Cameron just wasted 25 minutes showing us their harrowing escape when he's just gonna die 5 minutes later?

The only saving grace of this film are the visual effects, but (as George Lucas has proven) no amount of CGI eye-candy can make a mediocre film good.
That Titanic was ever made is proof of the low opinion mainstream film makers have of their audience's intelligence. And Titanic's success is proof that that low opinion is justified.