A beautiful recreation

Rating: 3/10 (6 June 2019)

I have a personal reason for disliking the grand epic Titanic that swept eleven Academy Awards, but for the purposes of this review, I'll remain as impartial as possible. It won't do anyone any good to know that watching this film on the big screen as a child resulted in lifelong hydrophobia.
From an artistic standpoint, this movie is flawless. The research and replication of the ill-fated RMS Titanic resulted in an identical duplication. Peter Lamont's production design, Michael Ford's set decoration, and Martin Laing and Charles Lee's art direction is breathtaking. If you spend the entire three hours starting at minute details like dishes, wallpaper, and chandeliers, you'll feel like you're really aboard the ship. The beautiful fashions, designed by Deborah Lynn Scott, are authentic looking and gorgeous. Most of the movie is very beautiful to watch, including the famous dissolve from ruin to reconstruction in the beginning.
This wasn't the first movie about the Titanic, and this version's storyline isn't very interesting. Kate Winslet stars as a high-class lady travelling with her mother, Frances Fisher, and her fiancé, Billy Zane. She meets a low-class American, Leonardo DiCaprio, who won his passage in a card game, and he shows her how to really live and fall in love. Parts of the story are rather weak and feel like they belong in a Disney movie rather than a dramatic epic, but I'm sure the love story will please young-minded teenagers.
The beginning of the film recreates finding the remnants of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean, and a very old woman, Gloria Stuart, tells her memory of the voyage. There are a few cuts back and forth from Gloria's story to the 1912 timeline, but once the iceberg is hit, the rest of the film is shown in real-time, which is an interesting touch and a great feat accomplished by director James Cameron and his co-editors Conrad Buff and Richard A. Harris. However, during the last portion of the film, there are a few flaws that aren't hard to catch, the most obvious being a lack of foam in the seawater. The literally freezing water doesn't make anyone's teeth chatter until they're submerged, but if enclosed in iceberg-infested waters up to one's thighs, symptoms of the cold would absolutely be seen. In a romantic gesture, Kate Winslet is seen trudging her way through the water in her extremely heavy petticoats, but she wouldn't have been able to move so quickly if her legs were being frozen and the weight of her thick dress material were added to the mix.
So, depending on your point of view, you can fall in love with this beautiful splendor, full of iconic moments and a memorable theme and song. You can lose yourself in the historical replications or spend your time searching for flaws, which you'll find. I won't ever watch the movie again, but let me know what you think!
Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, since there are scary situations that scarred me for life, I wouldn't let my kids watch it.