Titanic (1997)
Directed by James Cameron
101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story of her life aboard the Titanic, 84 years later. A young Rose boards the ship with her mother and fiancé. Meanwhile, Jack Dawson and Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets aboard the ship. Rose tells the whole story from Titanic's departure through to its death—on its first and last voyage—on April 15, 1912.
23 connections found
View:
23 films that influenced Titanic
What critics say influenced Titanic
Thus in this film, unlike "Titanic" of 1954 or "A Night to Remember" of 1958, the ship is not shudderingly gashed by the berg but merely penetrated by a stiletto of ice, spreading 12 square feet of damage over 300 feet of hull.
One beauty of the movie is that it never overshadows Roy Baker's marvelous 1958 film of Walter Lord's A Night to Remember, which is a clinical, semi-documentary dissection of the luxury liner's sinking.
Probably the best film ever made about this tragedy is a 1958 film called "A Night to Remember."
The movie can't compete with "A Night to Remember" (1958), which remains the truly essential film about the disaster.
Hollywood first gave it a go in 1953 in Fox’s “Titanic,” with the British “A Night to Remember” following to general acclaim in 1958.
(For a film that does all of these things better than Titanic, see A Night to Remember .)
CAMERON WAS probably trying to make his "Gone with the Wind," but Rose lacks the verve and spirit of Scarlett; Winslet thus is denied any opportunity to do a Vivien Leigh.
Re-watching Titanic 15 years on, there can surely be little remaining doubt that this film ranks alongside Gone With The Wind and Cleopatra as a once-in-a-generation Hollywood epic.
It's a mixed bag, but it won 11 Oscars out of 14 nominations and, despite its monstrous $200 million budget, grossed something like $600 million and beat Gone with the Wind as the most popular film of all time.
At any rate, the film's narrative progression is a hell of a lot closer to a Towering Inferno than it is to the film's most often-cited analogue, Gone with the Wind : that film, like Doctor Zhivago or Reds , follows a single star-crossed couple through years of history, full of different incidents; Titanic takes place over four days, and involves a love affair interrupted by the most famous maritime disaster of the 20th Century.
It’s like complaining about the pulp dialogue in Star Wars : It just goes to show you don’t get it.
Of course, Tinseltown came back big in 1977 with "Star Wars", the first modern blockbuster.
It surpassed previous champs Star Wars and E.T.
This is the equivalent of watching "Star Wars" and getting immersed in the Han Solo/Princess Leia story while forgetting all about the Death Star.
Cameron’s obsessiveness and overspending invite a great deal of comparison with Michael Cimino's disastrous 1980 film Heaven’s Gate.
Advertisement
As James Cameron demonstrated with the conversion of “Titanic,” 3-D is best used to accent important objects and things — like the ruby slippers and the Wicked Witch’s nose.
James Cameron employs a similar approach in Titanic when, in the "present" sequences, he uses computer graphics to show what happened to the ship as it broke up so that, when we see it happen, we comprehend what is transpiring.
In recent years, a hint of off-putting harshness has crept into Winslet's work (in Revolutionary Road and Mildred Pierce, she did too much gloomy suffering for our sins), but in Titanic she plays Rose as a spiky princess, trapped by privilege, who allows herself to melt like a girl and, in doing so, melts her own prison and finds herself as a woman.
The ingenuity of Cameron's compassionate sadism is unrelenting—rivets and panels groaning like the foundation of the house in Poltergeist , mooring lines of the ships funnels snapping like lightening and picking off flailing bodies in the ocean, walls of water cascading through the gleaming white hallways of the lower decks and rushing underneath the beds of elderly couples too infirm to try to swim for it.
Advertisement
At any rate, the film's narrative progression is a hell of a lot closer to a Towering Inferno than it is to the film's most often-cited analogue, Gone with the Wind : that film, like Doctor Zhivago or Reds , follows a single star-crossed couple through years of history, full of different incidents; Titanic takes place over four days, and involves a love affair interrupted by the most famous maritime disaster of the 20th Century.
He's already made "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2"; with "Titanic" he has his eye on "Doctor Zhivago" / "Lawrence of Arabia" territory.
The costliest film ever made is also one of the best, unlike the second costliest, Kevin Costner's ill-fated Waterworld (and just what is it with aquatic over-expenditures these days, anyway?).
Artistically and financially "Titanic" will probably win in the final tally, but (if the movies of the past several years teach us anything) it's a "Waterworld" after all.
Remember "Waterworld," the previous most-expensive-movie-ever-made?
That was before ""Heaven's Gate," before ""Waterworld," before the media became obsessed with budgets, Mike Ovitz and opening-weekend grosses.