Historically Accurate for its Time, Yet is Hindered by it being Directed by James Cameron

Rating: 6/10 (3 May 2020)

One of the interesting things about this film is that it's pretty clear how Titanic and Avatar are both cut from, essentially, the same cloth despite being two completely different films on paper.
As it is widely understood, a lot of time, effort, and money went into making this film possible and it shows. Aside from a couple moments here and there, Titanic is still a fairly impressive looking film to date. Of course, nowadays there is more information about Titanic's interior design with the aid of 20 more years of research behind us and, thus, there are some inaccuracies in this film in that regard, as well as the way the ship sank, but overall, it is clear that they went to painstaking lengths to make this film look as accurate and authentic as possible and I think they succeeded. Of course when you have James Cameron at the helm, usually films end up turning out looking quite impressive so it's no surprise that this film would be any different.
However, James Cameron is also one of the reasons why this film falls very short of what it could have been. This has much to do with the quality of writing and its execution. Cal Hockley is little short of a diet James Bond villain and I have no idea what his motivations for pursuing his obviously aloof fiancee aside from serving as an antagonist for Jack. The guy shows no interest in Rose, yet he says he loves her and it seems like the film, at some point, is trying to frame him as being truthful about it- but who knows at this point? On top of that, there's also the same writing trap that this film fall into as Avatar would years later with the very cartoonish poor people good, rich people bad theme which only ages worse when one looks into the real reasons why ships of that time were organized by class.
There's also a lot of blatant misrepresentation when it comes to a myriad of issues including the crew of the Titanic and the ship's lifeboat situation-which are all comments made with the aide of hindsight- which makes for a pretty bad representation of history.
One of my biggest criticisms of this kind of love story is that usually the female lead is fairly plain and the male lead is where all the personality and likability is. For Titanic, the reverse is true. Rose is extremely likable and has a lot of personality and Kate Winslet is the star of the show, in my opinion. Jack is quite plain on the other hand. I know DiCaprio is a popular actor but I didn't feel as if he really added anything to this role. It just seemed that they hired him to play himself.
Despite my criticisms, this is still a pretty well-made film. It has a lot of issues but it is still worth seeing. The love story is predictable but I don't think people watch romance films for their expectations to be subverted anyway. It's far from a bad film, and despite its 3 hour run time it makes excellent use of it. This is probably the date night film to end all date night films until The Notebook came out at the very least that says something.