It’s an old-school Hollywood period spectacle like Doctor Zhivago or Gone with the Wind (without the evil), mixed with a 1970s disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno. The actors are game, the dialog is uneven, and James Cameron is a highly skilled director. It’s worth seeing so long as you accept it for what it is.
I saw the movie three times when it first came out. It was the story of the disaster that interested me. The love story—not so much.
And, as that one deckhand correctly pointed out, she damaged White Star Line property!
I’m somewhat more charitable. I’d say the acting is perfectly fine, and the writing in general is as (deliberately) simple as it needs to be to appeal to the teenage demographic, but not so simple as to run the adults out of the theater. It’s got the classic setup/punchline style of writing where it shows you a thing, then in some later scene uses the thing. As opposed to hack screenwriting where things just sort of happen, with major plot elements being driven by things that appear out of nowhere, or to the more advanced kind of screenwriting where it shows you a thing, then uses a thing in a way that seems like a pay off, then uses the same thing in a different way that completely blows your mind, plus maybe once more for a bit of added punch (think Damon Lindelof with The Leftovers).
And yes, Cameron is a highly skilled director.
I said dialog, not script. Titanic has an excellent screenplay. The dialog could have used a bit of a brush-up, but its script - the structure, the characters - is very good.
(And “The actors are game” means that the acting is good)
You know, for some reason I read that as “the actors and the…”. Cheerfully withdrawn.
Ah yes, Chekhov’s Thing. 
… nods sagely…
It’s not a bad film. It may be impossible to watch it now and experience it like when it was new, but it’s mostly a fine film. If you’re going to nitpick it, it’s got a whole mine of material, but you’d better get your picks out for…every other large blockbuster extravaganza, to be fair.
After about the tenth viewing I began to hate the present day scenes, but you can’t remove them without taking away some of the sad beauty of the film. Like the transition from Jack and Rose on the bow with a slow tracking dissolve to the wreck. Or young Rose becoming old Rose. Those are great shots.
And the soundtrack is first rate.
How? it was most likely owned by the insurance company. It would have ended up in the Smithsonian, next to the Hope Diamond (in effect, in context of the movie, it WAS the Hope diamond, or at least cleaved from the same original large stone.)
People love to unfavorably compare this to A Night To Remember, but they always conveniently forget the love story that is in there. There’s even a scene with the two lovers and Andrews at the mantel, just like in Titanic.
Welll…he has his biases, which do come through. And, he had THREE cameos in the film! Isn’t that a bit much? 
Hitch limited himself to one per film.
It was inwented in Russia.
I’ve seen the movie at least four times, and I’ve never noticed him. Any hints?
He’s in the opening scene, running the movie camera as the Titanic departs
He’s in the Irish bar scene
He (or, at least his hands) double for Jack drawing Rose
And I think he does a voice
(or so I have always thought)
eta: IMDB says he has two others, which I never knew, and does not list the movie camera or below decks bar, but I am pretty sure I read those somewhere a long time ago, and they do look like him
Do you mean someone rewatching it, or someone seeing it for the first time? And someone intimately familiar with all the learned criticism here or someone approaching it cold?
I’ve never seen it. What about a period piece set in 1912 would seem different to a 2025 viewer versus a 1997 viewer? Or did I miss your point entirely?
Oh, I meant watching for the first time, having never read the learned criticism (hehe) and doesn’t know a thing about it, outside of, say, watching the trailer.
The backlash started early, because people hate things everyone else likes, and Titanic was certainly well liked in 1997, no doubt! People really got into the love story (including some of us old fart guys), even my 70 year old mom sat through the 3 1/2 hour run time fully captivated.
So I’m not sure it is possible for someone to see it cold as we did in the context of 1997 cinema. It’s nearly 30 years on, and movies are different. Tastes have changed, and storytelling has advanced. This is not unlike the learned criticism of Citizen Kane, and how it is difficult for people to see that film as it was in 1941.
In my opinion, Titanic is no worse than most good films, but it is easy to hate. And I can see why. It has its problems with the story. However, the filmmaking is top notch. You really feel you are there. If you let it get you, you really care about the characters, and it is easy to ignore the issues while you are in the moment.
Oh no, I didn’t mean it that way. Any good story works in any time frame. There’s nothing really “period” that is too much to pick up from context.
Like Star Trek TOS is really about 1960s man in a future setting, I think the real “period” problem is that Rose is a 1990s woman in a 1912 world. She lives her life on her own terms, she doesn’t remain silent, she makes her own decisions about who she loves, and that really wasn’t done. Her “job” was to marry Cal and cement the futures of both families. She didn’t have to love him, it was a business merger.
But her being a 1990s woman is what made the film relatable to so many people. Young guys identified with Jack, young women identified with Rose (and felt Jack non-threatening like many a teen idol ) and everyone hated Cal. He united everyone.
Rivet counters loved the technical details, and some felt sad at the deaths and cheered the heroism and bravery. It was a film that made it OK for men to cry at movies (well, as long as no one noticed!)
I remember towards the end, there was a scene where the movie went very quiet for a few seconds, and I realized that EVERYONE in the theater was crying, myself included. Call it genuine emotion or call it emotional manipulation, you got to respect a flick capable of doing that.
Thank you for the complete explanation. I see what you’re getting at.
Perhaps you should read of
Her book (and her biography) are IMO a must-read.
Beryl was a real world archetype of what you describe Rose to be. Beryl was also a few years (10?) younger than Rose would have been. Now for sure, Beryl was a member of a minority group of very few women in her era. But it wasn’t zero.
Oh she sounds fascinating! She is indeed Rose.
I put her book in the cart.
Both her own book West with the Night and the authorized biography Straight on Til Morning are good reads.
Speaking of strange Titanic things, consider this…
Jack Dawson, (played by a very young Leonardo DiCaprio), wins a ticket on Titanic, 1912. Attends a first class dinner, develops a taste for finer things. Pockets ‘Heart Of The Ocean’, survives the sinking, pawns the diamond, spends 10 yrs building his wealth.
In 1922 moves to West Egg, as Jay Gatsby, (played by a now older Leonardo DiCaprio), a millionaire with a shady past and a fear of swimming pools!
On the one hand, if these were real people, you’d be right - that’d be a pretty fucked up way for someone to feel after decades and decades building a real life and raising real children with someone else. And in a “fridge logic” sense you definitely notice that hey, that’s kinda shitty when you think about the movie years after watching it.
But on the other hand, that’s just an artifact of this being a movie. None of these are real people, and her unnamed husband and kids are even less real than the characters who get screentime. It hasn’t been decades and decades since her fling, it was 5 minutes ago. So, fine, whatever. It’s a movie.
I like to think that the people on the ship weren’t welcoming her “home”, as it were, when she died, but welcoming her into Eternity. It has to be quite a shock to find out that it was all true, that there really is a heaven. Might take some getting used to. So familiar faces welcome you, and since she had just been thinking about That Day, and she was exactly over the ship, they got the assignment. Eventually she’ll get back to her husband and father of her children. When you die, you get to do everything. There’s plenty of time in eternity, and if that’s not enough, there’s more.
Or the end was just her dying brain shorting out. “Rose, bud”.