"A Night to Remember 3"

Rating: Null/10 (21 August 1999)

I liked "Titanic". Its a good old fashioned adventure/romance/epic with a strong storyline and definable characters. Sure the tacked on romance is as stock as the characters, but that is still better than the alternative served up by most modern movies: ie--no plot and no characterization at all. The thing that bothers me about this version of the Titanic sinking is that writer/director Cameron takes full credit for the screenplay, when so much of it was directly lifted from a 1958 film about the event, "A Night to Remember" (also a book, and a previous film). And I'm not talking about the fact the Titanic sunk, or any of the other factual details of the story--obviously those will be the same. I'm talking about virtually identical scenes, events, and dialogue that could not be gathered from public record. Scenes such as the ship's builder standing alone in the tilted ballroom, looking at the painting on the wall as the ship goes down. Or the rich ship corporation a**hole being told that yes, his ship is going to sink, no matter what he says. Or identical scenes of the steerage rabble breaking through the gates. These scenes, and many others, are mounted and shot in so similar a fashion to the previous film, with such similar dialog, that I believe they cross the border into plagerism. Rent the 1958 version of "A Night to Remember", watch it, and tell me I'm wrong.