You've got to be kidding.....

Rating: 1/10 (5 September 1998)

The most impressive thing about Titanic is the awards, audiences, and money that can be raked in by such a crummy movie.
Of course, Titanic does have truly incredible special effects and good cinematography, but it seems as if Mr. Cameron said to himself, "I have a trillion dollars worth of sinking ship special effects, now what can I do to pad it out to 195 minutes?" So he sat down for about 20 minutes and wrote the story and the screenplay. Unfortunately, the story takes much longer to tell than it apparently did to write.
The story is about first class passenger Little Girl Rose trapped in a young womans body and engaged to a wealthy ogre and third class passenger Little Boy Jack trapped in a young mans body, traveling the world to draw pictures of nude bar prostitutes who incredulously meet on board the Titanic, fall almost immediately in lust, Little Boy Jack draws a nude picture of Little Girl Rose, the two have a romp in the back seat of a car, the ship sinks.
As pathetic as the story is, most of the other components of the film are just as bad. The dialogue is so contrived and sappy it seems like something one would expect from a 50 cent paperback romance. The music is just as sappy, mostly orchestrated snippets of that wretched song by Screamin Celine. The acting: it seems the actors realized the stupidity of the dialog they were reciting and just wanted to get the heck out of there.
Finally, over an hour and a half into the movie, the ship hits the iceberg. In the next hour we have the only 30 minutes of the film worth seeing. The special effects are tremendous its as if I was actually aboard the Titanic. Unfortunately, by the time the film got to this point, I was so bored out of my skull it was difficult to see this as anything but a bunch of special effects. Until then, there had been no emotional "hook" in the film, so by the time it got to all the drama of the ship sinking and desperate people panicking and trying to cling to their lives, there was nothing to feel.
The two really good things about Titanic are, after what seemed like seven months in the theater, it finally ended, and once it comes out on video, insomnia will be a thing of the past.