A Milestone Film for the Decade

Rating: 10/10 (30 November 1998)

I realize that "Titanic" is really the kind of movie where you love it or hate it for what it is. And I must say that in all truth I side strongly with the 'love it' category.
When I first saw this masterpiece, nearly a year ago, I was in short amazed at the power director James Cameron had achieved. By setting up the actual Titanic disaster with a love story he was able to make me feel like I was right there on the decks of the Titanic as she sank below the Atlantic surface. Seeing 1,500 people freezing to death in the chilling ocean waters in the dark early morning of April the 15th, 1912, I was simply shocked, chilled, mostly because of the realization that this is what happened. Also having known that Cameron had labored so long and hard to get even the most non-essential details correct in his depiction of the ocean liner's disaster helped me feel it too.
There is definitely a lesson to be learned from "Titanic". Quite a few really. For one thing it is the ultimate reminder that no matter how technologically advanced we are, God will always have the last word on everything. Perhaps Titanic the disaster was a reminder that we need to be careful what ideas we get about our power. "She is unsinkable. God Himself could not sink this ship," said the character Cal.
Another lesson, this one related to film: if you are going to spend hundreds of millions on the making and marketing of a film, at least make an honest effort to give the audience a story they can feel, and be involved with. Recent films such as "Armageddon" and "Godzilla", I think, have been hurt by this overwhelming realization by audiences. The gross of "Titanic", which has hit $1.8 billion worldwide, testifies a new hunger for movies that tell their story with really great effects in them, rather than stories written around the idea of effects.
I know there are many dissenters out there for this film, but like it or not, twenty years from now there will be a big re-release for this wonderful epic, and again the world will be caught in a Titanic craze, and I will be telling my children about when "Titanic" first came out- just as my dad tells me now about when "Star Wars" came out he was floored as well- like ninety percent of the rest of the movie-going nation. "Titanic" works so well because it hits so many basic levels of human feeling, because it has such a strong understanding of what the devotion of love is.
And for those of you who call off "Titanic" and its success to "Leo-Mania," I went to see "Titanic" ten times in the theater. I am not a big Leo-fan, and I know he's done better work than this. I am 19 and I'm a guy. Going to see this in the theater, not once in those ten times did the audience consist of at least 75 percent adults.
A masterpiece. "Nuff said.