Titanic

Plot synopsis:
In 1996, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his team aboard the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh search the wreck of RMS Titanic for a necklace with a rare diamond, the Heart of the Ocean. They recover a safe containing a drawing of a young woman wearing only the necklace dated April 14, 1912, the day the ship struck the iceberg. Rose Dawson Calvert, the woman in the drawing, is brought aboard Keldysh and tells Lovett of her experiences aboard Titanic.
In 1912 Southampton, 17-year-old first-class passenger Rose DeWitt Bukater, her fiancé Cal Hockley, and her mother Ruth board the luxurious Titanic. Ruth emphasizes that Rose's marriage will resolve their family's financial problems and retain their high-class persona. Distraught over the engagement, Rose considers suicide by jumping from the stern; Jack Dawson, a penniless artist, intervenes and discourages her. Discovered with Jack, Rose tells a concerned Cal that she was peering over the edge and Jack saved her from falling. When Cal becomes indifferent, she suggests to him that Jack deserves a reward. He invites Jack to dine with them in first class the following night. Jack and Rose develop a tentative friendship, despite Cal and Ruth being wary of him. Following dinner, Rose secretly joins Jack at a party in third class.
Aware of Cal and Ruth's disapproval, Rose rebuffs Jack's advances, but realizes she prefers him over Cal. After rendezvousing on the bow at sunset, Rose takes Jack to her state room; at her request, Jack sketches Rose posing nude wearing Cal's engagement present, the Heart of the Ocean necklace. They evade Cal's bodyguard and have sex in an automobile inside the cargo hold. On the forward deck, they witness a collision with an iceberg and overhear the officers and designer discussing its seriousness.
Cal discovers Jack's sketch of Rose and an insulting note from her in his safe along with the necklace. When Jack and Rose attempt to inform Cal of the collision, he has his bodyguard slip the necklace into Jack's pocket and accuses him of theft. Jack is arrested, taken to the master-at-arms' office, and handcuffed to a pipe. Cal puts the necklace in his own coat pocket.
With the ship sinking, Rose flees Cal and her mother, who has boarded a lifeboat, and frees Jack. On the boat deck, Cal and Jack encourage her to board a lifeboat; Cal claims he can get himself and Jack off safely. After Rose boards one, Cal tells Jack the arrangement is only for himself. As her boat lowers, Rose decides that she cannot leave Jack and jumps back on board. Cal takes his bodyguard's pistol and chases Rose and Jack into the flooding first-class dining saloon. After using up his ammunition, Cal realizes he gave his coat and consequently the necklace to Rose. He later boards a collapsible lifeboat by carrying a lost child.
After braving several obstacles, Jack and Rose return to the boat deck. The lifeboats have departed and passengers are falling to their deaths as the stern rises out of the water. The ship breaks in half, lifting the stern into the air. Jack and Rose ride it into the ocean and he helps her onto a wooden panel only buoyant enough for one person. He assures her that she will die an old woman, warm in her bed. Jack dies of hypothermia but Rose is saved.
With Rose hiding from Cal en route, the RMS Carpathia takes the survivors to New York City where Rose gives her name as Rose Dawson. She later finds out Cal committed suicide after losing all his money in the 1929 Wall Street crash.
Back in the present, Lovett decides to abandon his search after hearing Rose's story. Alone on the stern of Keldysh, Rose takes out the Heart of the Ocean — in her possession all along — and drops it into the sea over the wreck site. While she is seemingly asleep or has died in her bed, photos on her dresser depict a life of freedom and adventure inspired by the life she wanted to live with Jack. A young Rose reunites with Jack at the Titanic's Grand Staircase, applauded by those who died.

Tags: tragedy

Review:
I highly recommend the "play all" option, it has a running time of 187 minutes which will be long for some, but I find you are more aware and drawn into the stories, and because it is a drama it is much more of an emotional experience if you watch them consecutively because you are still in that mindset.
Julian Fellowes' Titanic felt to me more like a re-imagining than a retelling of an all too familiar story.
The story lines overlap and all meet in the same disastrous finale: the sinking of the ship.Although there are no big names in the cast, several are familiar faces (Maria Doyle Kennedy, Linus Roache, Toby Jones, Steven Waddington, Stephen Campbell Moore, Celia Imrie, James Wilby, Linda Kash).To my knowledge this is the only "Titanic" story that has included the real-life Dorothy Gibson (played by Sophie Winkleman), an American movie actress, who survived the disaster.
I think a lot of people are comparing this to James Cameron's Titanic, but if you want a different take on the actual sinking on the ship, then do watch this.
Perhaps when the DVD is released and there are no loud and ugly commercials every 5 minutes the story will hold together.Julian Fellowes, so respected for his writing of such series as Downton Abbey, etc.
seems to have the urge to tell the story of the event through quick snippets of personal stories among the passengers - a commendable idea, but when the tiny tales are buried in the almost immediate collision with the iceberg and the attempt to flesh out the story by making it about how tragedy affects people's relationships come as little disconnected pop-ups, it is difficult to care about anybody, much less get to know them well enough to remember them at picture's end.
Granted there are some moments before the ship is finished that emphasize the fact that the unsinkable Titanic was rushed to completion before it was safely ready, and those flashbacks to offer some interesting moments.But basically the story is the same as all the other TITANIC movies - a study about class distinction not only among the peerage of Brits but also the differentiation among first, second and third (steerage) classes - with a hefty dollop of snubbing the crass American passengers.
Most of the drama had a very rushed feel to it, consequently characters came and went, story lines(and rather derivative ones at that) were introduced but never satisfactorily elaborated upon or resolved(especially Mary Maloney's) and the main characters lack depth or even any sort of genuine personality and it doesn't help that here they are all underdeveloped stereotypes.Some scenes particularly at the start take a while to get going, maybe in an attempt to give the characters depth but seeing as they failed with that aspect the first episode was dull, and the sinking scenes which had potential to be riveting lacked any true tension.
The rest of the acting considering the cast pedigree was disappointing, and the fact that a lot don't have much to do has a lot to do with it.Toby Jones for example is a good actor, but is one of these, and for me he also had a character that was all too derivative of some of his other roles(such as a less-evil version of Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop).
All in all, a big soggy and largely unmoving disappointment, better than the animated versions, which are the "what-the-devil-did-I-just-watch?" sort of quality, but for a better version try the sumptuous James Cameron version which had an absolutely riveting last hour and especially the brilliant A Night to Remember.
Given the easy potential for creating a compelling, suspenseful drama set aboard the most famous ship in history during its final hours, TITANIC is shamefully poor.
It's a wasted opportunity from the get-go, a lazy class-based drama in which – unforgivably – the sinking of the ship comes second to high melodrama and character relationships.
The sinking takes place in the last half hour and almost seems incidental.The characters are dull and featureless, each occupying a clichéd niche in society: there are the haughty aristocrats, the tradespeople, the servants, the Irish working classes, the stubborn captain, the decent officers, the good-looking Italian waiter.
Decent actors like Maria Doyle Kennedy and Toby Jones are lost amid the sea of faces – if there ever was a series with just too many extraneous characters, then this is it.
The Titanic is a cheesy CGI creation that wouldn't be out of place in a bad B-movie, there's no indication at any point that the sea was freezing cold (that's what killed the majority of the people, after all), and disaster scenes are limited to some water sloshing about on the deck – I thought the toilets had backed up for a second, I didn't realise that was supposed to be the ship going down!
Titanic debuted in Canada on March 21 and if the rest of the series was like the first episode then I can't recommend this version.
Otherwise, the story is just more of the same fictitious crap devised to retell this story incorrectly in a new, agonizingly dull way.That boat was filled with thousands of interesting stories that are never told - I have read snippets here and there over the years that include stories of stowaways, a woman who wouldn't sleep at night for fear of the ship sinking, a Japanese businessman, a French mistress travelling secretly with her lover, numerous honeymooning couples...
Frankly, this version of Titanic resembles Downton Abbey on Ice...Come April 15 I hope TCM has a marathon of the better movies about the Titanic - A Night to Remember, and S.O.S. Titanic, because this series is dull and boring, not like the real story at all..
It was awful to say the least mainly because the format of the series being one episode per week instead of over four days, I think the opening episode has put a lot of people off basically because it's too rushed towards the sinking, the characters are all behaving in a bad and rude manner, everything is crammed in without saying what the point of it is about, it would have been better if it introduced you to the characters in the first episode leading up to the sinking in episodes three and four!, I don't know how this is going to work as far as I have seen it's poorly put together despite the money spent on nice sets!.As for the acting I am truly disappointed mainly because the plots seem pointless, this is a weak episode but with more better episodes surely to come, I think this format has put a dampener on the mini series it could have had a better introduction..
I wasn't expecting great things of this title (I have issues regarding things made by ITV), but as its the 100th anniversary coming up, I felt I should give this a watch, without trying to get to excited (although admittedly, I was really looking forward to watching it).So far, I've only seen two episodes, and I have to say, while they aren't perfect, I feel that they are a good watch for a casual enthusiast of Titanic.
Let me just touch on a couple of bad points.Now, I don't know as much as a lot of people about the ship, but it does have some errors in historical accuracy, although reviewing from my perspective as somebody who knows a fair bit, but not a massive amount (or somebody, like me, who used to know, but is too stupid to remember...), I can say that you won't notice anything so bad that will ruin it for you, even though looking at the forums, some people seem to have taken great offence to this.My main gripe with these episodes is that they are very rushed.
While it was an interesting, if ambitious attempt at telling the story, I have to admit, I think that it would have worked better by going through in order, rather than chopping and changing the main characters every episode (although I have to say, it's nice they aren't doing a Cameron and just focusing on a couple of people).
I've read several reviews of Julian Fellowes' Titanic, and I agree with comments about the choppy, confusing editing (I'm sure there was a point to it, but I kept thinking I had started with the wrong episode, or in the middel of one...) I also agree with those that found the cast to be lacking in chemistry or real emotion.
I'm not a viewer of "Downton Abbey", writer Julian Fellowes big small-screen success story of recent times, but given the broad perception that it appears mainly to be a class-driven soap opera of a hundred years or so ago, I guess my hopes for this ITV four-parter weren't very high and so it proved.For a start, I found the non-linear narrative construction both confusing and irritating.
The first 30-40 minutes of each episode comprised supposed character-studies and depicted various interrelationships of passengers and crew, before the ship hits the iceberg to trigger the worst maritime disaster of all time.
The ship thus hits the berg four times, weakening, if not deadening the obvious climax to the piece.Unlike James Cameron's Hollywood epic, which focused on one relationship at its heart, Fellowes of course gives us loads and has many of his characters apparently at some sort of crossroads in their lives, falling in or out of relationships like it was the Love Boat.
Some of the plotting is distinctly fanciful, especially the notion that the anarchist leader of the infamous 1910 Saracen Street siege finds his way on board and his own way to redemption, otherwise it just looked like a big period soap opera with a particularly tragic ending.The story of the Titanic will no doubt be done again and again down the years, though not for some time I'd imagine as its centenary passes, but I doubt this will be one of the best-remembered dramatisations.
The James Cameron film is a big-budget Hollywood studio disaster/action movie, in which the main characters are fabrications who are not based on historical fact.
This television series is a sober and serious drama that tells the story of class conflict and tragedy, based on real life characters who actually were present on the voyage.
ITV's 'Titanic' sunk without a trace because it couldn't cope with the first of these, couldn't match the expectations, and didn't get the ratings.The reason may be is that we had it so rammed down our throats that it was going to be the best thing on TV ever It couldn't meet that level of pressure, especially when James Cameron's film of the same subject matter has become long associated as the accepted version.There are some nice performances, there are some nice moments.
And one that is not actually a drag to sit through.The 2012 "Titanic" series focus on the ship and the stories of the passengers, which is what the audience wants to see.
And the visuals do play a big part in a drama about the Titanic.The costume and props department also did their job quite well, fleshing out the atmosphere nicely.If you have an interest in the Titanic then you should take the time to sit down and watch this 2012 TV mini-series, because it is actually quite entertaining and good..
But then in next chapters we get to know them and this is great opportunity to see a story from many points of view, rich and poor people that were on that ship.
This miniseries is not at all like James Cameron's movie (in fact, I do like this miniseries more than that movie) because this is set around a whole group of people and not just a fictional love story.
yes, the first part was a bit rushed, but the next 3 episodes were much more improved.and to the people criticizing this because this has inaccuracies, yes it does, but newsflash: EVERY movie that has been made about Titanic has inaccuracies.
I recommend people "binge-watch" it, either all at once or at least break it up into two episodes per day.The episodes correspond well, in my opinion, even though the overall plot isn't about one person (like in Jim Cameron's Titanic).
The stories are sometimes re-told in future episodes through a different character's perspective.
Each episode builds on the previous one, adding more detail to the different characters' (some characters are completely fictional and others are based off of real passengers) lives.Even though the costumes, set design, and CGI aren't as spectacular or accurate as in Jim Cameron's movie, they're still very impressive.
I think people definitely should have watched all the episodes before reviewing this..
As a result, I found myself moved by some of the characters but confused by others and therefore, not as entertained, or at the least interested, as by the recent re-release of the 1997 James Cameron version, that was converted to 3-D, at the same time as this broadcast, both of which were out in time for the anniversary of that ship's going under a century ago.
Really, all I'll now say is if you want to watch yet another version of what happened on that ship with yet another depiction of the ways people acted then, whether fictionalized or not, go watch this version of "Titanic".
I was looking forward to this series, expecting top drama and characters I wanted to root for.
Unfortunately what I got was a low budget retelling of James Cameron's Titanic.As I watched I started to notice a few similarities to Cameron's screenplay, such as certain character stereotypes, thematic tropes, story lines ...
There were people who couldn't reach the boats, and the first boat was not launched until an hour after the collision, because the ship was badly organised and managed - that is the *real* tragedy of Titanic.The sinking itself is completely mishandled, a confusing mish-mash of scenes with no sense of increasing danger, just a desperate effort to tie-up all the plots which started in the first three episodes.
ABC-TV lucked out in that reports say almost nobody watched their "much anticipated" TITANIC mini-series.
I felt like there was no time to connect with the characters or care about certain people surviving or not surviving the sinking.
And isn't that why people loved Cameron's Titanic?
In comparing it to the film, I would say that audience will care a whole lot more for Jack and Rose than any romantic couple or family on Fellowe's Titanic.
If I had known all of this before watching the first episode, I think it would have made me enjoy the series that much more.Plus, I find the Countess of Manton annoying.
When I first heard about this television drama mini series, I was a little bit dubious, especially as I thought nothing could compare to the spectacle of the brilliant 1997 blockbuster success, but then I heard it was written by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey), so I was willing to give it a go.
Basically the four episodes start at different points before or during the voyage of the famous ship, the RMS Titanic, launched on 10th Aprl 1912, and we see a bunch of stories from the perspectives of many main characters, passengers and crew in all the classes, but mostly in the upper classes.
I decided to stick with this, but this turned out to be a silly decision, because it got worse as it went on, the characters are dull, even the ones you know like Captain Smith, the stories they have are boring and predictable, the Titanic sinking with special effects should have been much better, and overall it just feels like a terrible piece of trash that didn't need to be made.
They said it was going to be "Downton at sea", it was just a silly period drama with no imagination, and it was a bad way to be paying tribute to 100 years since the disaster happened, just stick to the James Cameron/Leonard DiCaprio/Kate Winslet version, especially if it's in 3D, this is a daft and dire costume drama series.
Oh, and trying to rip off the REAL Titanic story with Jack And Rose, by showing a waiter with a high class daughter..
I was presented a thread about a week ago on Facebook in which endless posters didn't realize there really was a Titanic.Complaints about this miniseries, which is fine to me, I've spent the day watching recreations on the Discovery channel, looks about like them, give me the impression people wanted My Heart Will Go On And On to start playing at the beginning and it didn't!
The sinking scenes were rushed and I couldn't help but want to watch James Cameron's version and A Night To Remember or even the Catherine Zeta- Jones version.
My favourite Titanic adaptations are as follows, 1st - James Cameron's 1997 epic, 2nd - 1958 British effort A Night To Remember, 3rd - 1996 Catherine Zeta-Jones mini-series, 4th - This ITV version, 5th - S.O.S. Titanic, 6th - 1953 version..
A New Mini-Series About The Titanic.
Titanic is a TV miniseries period drama based on the sinking of a passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean back in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City.It stars Toby Jones, Linus Roache, Geraldine Somerville and Maria Doyle Kennedy.It was released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the disaster.It was written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Jon Jones.Each of the first three episodes starts before the launch and follows different characters through to the ocean liner's collision with the iceberg, slowly unfolding more information and approaching scenes from different perspectives until the final episode follows everyone as the ship begins to sink, to powerful emotional effect.