Ship: Great, Script: Bad, Message: Evil

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2005)

If you're a Titanic buff and love Edwardian period pieces, you'll like the first scenes where they're exploring the wreck, be captivated by Kate Winslet's entrance, love the montage of the ship setting sail, and then be bored to death, if not absolutely disgusted, until the ship starts to sink.
Yes, the "love" story is saccharine and cliché, the script utterly formulaic, uninspired and just plain dumb, and the characters so card-board and tissue-thin you'd think they'd have turned to papier-mache before they drowned. The costumes and sets were truly magnificent though, and the special effects superb -- if building a 9/10 scale replica of the actual ship and then sinking it on film can be called "a special effect". If nothing else, Cameron deserves great acclaim for the unprecedented scale and un-equaled ambitiousness of the technical side of this film.
Despite the movie's reputation for the accuracy of its historic details, there are more than a few inaccuracies, some innocent, some outright despicable. An example of the first kind would be "the formal dinner" scene, which had the First Class passengers dining in what was in fact the First Class Smoking Lounge, rather than the First Class Dining Room (which shows up only briefly as the backdrop for Billy Zane's shooting rampage). Of the latter kind, probably the worst was the locked gates trapping the 3rd Class passengers below decks - and a crew determined to keep them there: historically, on the real ship, there were locked gates that kept the 3rd Class passengers from wandering into the 1st & 2nd class areas, but these "gates" were only 3' high and could be easily climbed - or stepped - over. The 3rd class passengers were not kept below, neither were they denied access to the life-boats. The problem was that most of the 3rd class were Scandinavians who spoke no English and most of the Titanic's stewards spoke no Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. When they were told to get up on deck, they just went to the 3rd class deck on the fantail. The stewards then tried to lead the women and children up to the boat decks, but, not understanding, most of them refused to leave their men. This "inaccuracy" in the movie was of course just the product of a little poetic license, helping to re-enforce the deep, moral, and thoroughly original message of the film: "poor people: good - rich people: bad!"
What reviewers seem always to miss is that Kate Winslet's character is not much of a heroine. Rose is, down to the last detail, a snide, rude, arrogant, superior, sanctimonious, self-centered, self-obsessed, vindictive, cruel, confused, conflicted, and utterly self-righteous little know-it-all of a princess, at once proud and insecure -- i.e., you're typical teen-age American girl, which probably is the real reason the movie was so popular with adolescent females.