Overblown

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2015)

You know, I love disaster movies, and you don't get much bigger a disaster flick than TITANIC, James Cameron's magnum opus, a massively-budgeted and massively award-winning 1997 film that swept the board at the Oscars and has gone down in history as one of the most popular films ever made. Yet I only enjoyed half of it, and that's due to a problematic structure that sacrifices disaster in favour of a cheesy, sappy romance story.
Cameron has always been king when it comes to technology and people interacting with it: from his early sci-fi movies to THE ABYSS and AVATAR, he's great at depicting a world where people interact with technology and use it to their advantage. When he focuses on the disaster and sinking of the ship, this is an excellent film with some very impressive special effects that really get across the scale of the disaster.
When it comes to human characters, Cameron is a much less assured writer. The romance that plays out here is more unrealistic than in a cheap paperback novel and just as twee. The characters are one-dimensional, from DiCaprio's irritating commoner to Winslet's utterly unbelievable aristocrat who falls in love with him. Their romantic scenes are cringeworthy and as with the other characters they act in very modern days that would have been alien to the era. The less said about the likes of Billy Zane's cardboard cut-out villain the better.
In the end, we get a film which spends the entire first hour and a half just plodding around with dumb characters before the disaster strikes, and then things pick up, although there are still lots of cheesy moments and poor dialogue. It's 2/3 romance and 1/3 disaster, and while the disaster stuff is great, the romance is execrable. A NIGHT TO REMEMBER remains the best retelling of the tragedy out there because it focused on the events of the tragedy; I feel Cameron's TITANIC does a disservice to those who lost their lives that night.