James Cameron's worst film

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2002)

I've seen a lot of overblown films in my lifetime, and I know that a lot of people believe the credibility of the Oscars died when Tom Hanks won two Best Actor awards in sequential years, but this film is what really killed the Oscars. The idea that Ben Hur could set a record for winning the most is hilarious when the story is taken into account, but the idea that such a contrived load of nonsense like this could equal it while a really well-made film like Gladiator only gets four awards... well, you get the picture.
I won't bore you with a detailed speech about the plot, because I am sure that anyone reading this will have been subjected to exactly that enough times already. Instead, I will just go through some of the things that really stood out in this film.
One thing that always bugs me about this film is how James Cameron claims to pay attention to the most minute detail in his films, and yet the pistol used by Billy Zane has pretty much been positively confirmed by numerous gun collectors as not having been put into production at the time the film was made. It would have been more factually accurate to put a gun from the old Spaghetti Westerns in this film, as a matter of fact. Another thing that flies right in the face of the facts is that a rich power-mad family such as that which our heroine is from would basically beat it into their daughters from birth that they had to take any crap a suitor would dish out at them. It might have been politically incorrect to put this on the screen, but that's the way the society such websites as ChristianAnswers.net wants us to return to actually functioned.
Another aspect of the film that bothers me is Leonard DiCraprio. When we first hear his dialogue about his world travels, well, I was laughing, because he hardly looks old enough to go to the coffee shop unsupervised. Kate looked like she outweighed him by a good fifty pounds, at least, and I'm sure the other passengers who were slumming it in steerage would have introduced him to the concept of how prisoners love each other. There's nothing quite like a guy who looks like a girl after being locked in a dank, smelly hole with your average underclass member of a repressive society for a few months. Naturally, the film goes out of its way to make you hate the rest of the passengers, so the proposed idea of having Arnold Schwarzenegger blow up the iceberg and save the day wouldn't have saved the film anyway. Unfortunately, I also found Kate's character rather unconvincing a lot of the time, too. Her behaviour just doesn't quite sync up with what you'd expect out of a girl from a circa-191X family of inbreeders.
In short, this film was nothing more than James Cameron's cynical pulling of the strings attached to the heart of every 12-50 year old woman who really ought to know better. Once the cinema-screen impact of the sinking is gone, there is nothing to endear the film to anyone who either has a brain in their head or likes to be made seasick. Instead, what we have is yet another marketing exercise from the mainstream media that pretty much proves ninety percent of people in the world can be told what they want instead of given it. Cameron just hasn't done a good film since Aliens because his ego is way out of control. And boy, does Titanic prove that in a big way.