Simply Boring

Rating: 1/10 (24 March 2002)

The simple fact is that the lead characters are badly-written cliches serving a formulaic story. The rich/poor conflict is overdone, and not believable (and the suffering of those below versus the comfort of those above amid the chaos of the sinking ship an exaggeration of history at best). Virtually every line spoken by the lead actors is wooden, false, unbelievable; it is hard to judge the acting when the actors -- who have shown considerable talent elsewhere -- are given such awful things to say> I do think Zane looks particularly bad here, but I'd give everyone a benefit-of-doubt due to the script. The frame story is of course ridiculous, but we could say the same thing about _Citizen Kane_; the difference is that the latter film is beautifully photographed, superbly acted,impressively composed, brilliantly edited, sophisiticated in its use of sound, and extremely well-written. _Titanic_ is most interesting when it shows us historical figures: Kathy Bates' Molly Brown is impressive (though her intervention in the love story is utter nonsense, and again because it is made up and badly so). The engineer whose awareness of the fact that there are not enough boats to save everyone is also interesting. The story of the band playing on, whatever they may have actually played (there is some debate), was handled in a fairly moving way. There is a lovely shot of an elderly couple resting in each other's arms, awaiting the end; this too echoes at least one such wealthy couple who chose to die together rather than be separated amid the "women and children first" calls. The ship's demise looks impressive, and of course is welcome, given the excessive length of the film. But overall the film sinks in one-dimensional characters spewing out one-dimensional lines(to even characterize some of them as one-dimensional is charitable)over one-dimensional music. The _Terminator_ films and _Aliens_ are more believable and show more depth (though if we'd listened carefully to Hamiliton's lines in the second T film, we might have foreseen _Titanic_'s aesthetic failure).