Titanic is A Fantastic Voyage!

Rating: 9/10 (14 January 2016)

The story of 'Titanic' is so good that if written as mere fiction, it would be dismissed as preposterous.
In April of 1912, Titanic set out on its maiden voyage to the City of New York. 'The Ship of Dreams' as it was called, was a floating palace for the wealthy elite, reportedly 'unsinkable' by incorporating the latest in shipbuilding technology. After winning a pair of third-class tickets for himself and a friend in a poker game, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) looks forward to returning to his native America but finds himself drawn to a first-class passenger named Rose (Kate Winslet). She is the 16-year-old fiancée of Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) - a high-society gentleman that doesn't like to lose - returning from her wedding in Europe; a match of convenience pushed by her mother to bolster the family's faded coffers. After Jack's chance meeting on the ship's fantail with Rose threatening to hurl herself into the ocean, an unlikely romance begins. No sooner do they profess their love to each other, than an iceberg in the North Atlantic tests the character of everyone on board, from the ship's captain to the poorest of the poor as it slowly iceberg rips the safe, stable deck out from beneath the characters.
Titanic is an extraordinary motion picture – a jaw-dropping feat of outstanding art direction, costume design and cinematography. The film captures the essence and decadence of the era, as well as the spirit and raw allure of the ship herself. Coupled with nearly seamless visual effects, James Cameron's Titanic feels like a wholly real creation. Instead of treating the Titanic as a microcosm of society, Cameron makes the ship a vividly realized, fluid symbol of human destiny, mapping the different levels of the ship as levels of character, from the social graces of the salon to the sexual heat of the engine room. Created through a complex blend of partial sets, models and digital effects, Cameron's Titanic is breathtaking in its wholeness, heartbreaking in its destruction. The film's final hour portrays the sinking, not merely as spectacle, but as a series of harsh moral choices that must be made by all the characters as they decide who will live and who will die. But perhaps, the neatest thing about his filmmaking is the engaging way 'Titanic' sucks us into what seems, on the surface, to be a magnetic romance, while underneath, there are dangerous currents of class consciousness and shoals of hubris. Yes, he does paint his story in broad strokes, and some of the dialogue is risible, but Leo and Kate sell the hell out of it, with their undeniable chemistry.
Titanic isn't just a great film, it's a magnificent historical record of one of the most unfortunate disasters in the annals of human history, that is both poignant and personal.