RealityChuck, I do enjoy some good character development and romance scenes. Unfortunately, Titanic had neither.
I disagree. The scene at the beginning, on the salvage vessel, where the bearded guy shows the computer simulation of the sinking and explains how the keel split, leaving the stern to sink perpendicular to the waterline, was crucial. Had that not been made clear beforehand, seeing it played out would have been a confusing distraction. Also, I love how most of the “Old Rose” sequences end with someone grumbling, “Okay, okay, get on with it,” but when they return to 199? after the portrait scene, everyone’s spellbound.
There was a lot more to the “Old Rose” scenes in the original script. For instance, she was supposed to remark, in voiceover, that she hadn’t been the first nor the last teenage girl to be seduced in the back seat of a car, but Cameron wisely left that out of the final edit. I think there was just enough of the contemporary stuff to make it comprehensible. We’re talking about a very rich subject, after all (the ship and the sinking, not the made-up love story), and there has to be some way to bring the non-Titanic-buff members of the audience up to speed.
I thought Cameron did an excellent job of recreating both the magnificent grandeur of the Titanic as well as the class-obliterating humanity in its sinking. I had always imagined the heart-wrenching goodbyes, the agony and confusion deciding who stays and who goes, the gut-wrenching knowledge that the ship was indeed sinking. I expected all that.
I didn’t expect, however, some haunting images Cameron recreated that have stayed with me even though I haven’t seen the movie since it came out: passengers falling several stories to their deaths when the boat up-ended; the constant, baleful din of hundreds of souls in the water crying and moaning; the agonizing resolve of the lifeboaters to ignore the whistles of the crewmen requesting aid; the haunting silence and utter darkness at the scene after the boat finally slipped under water.
Those images alone were with the price of admission. Fluffy love story aside, it was a very compelling, and humbling, movie.
Was it a better movie than Star Wars or Gone With The Wind? I can’t even begin to compare the two. Luke Skywalker is a figment of George Lucas’s imagination. Sir John Astor actually existed. They’re both heroes, but, gosh, one actually existed.
John Aster was never a “sir”.
Another one was the Irish mother telling her child a final bed time story. Rose’s paintings (yes, I KNOW they weren’t on the ship) under the water, the man telling his crying family, “It’s only for a little while…just goodbye for a little while.”
I also thought that Victor Garber was perfect as Thomas Andrews.
People dislike extremely successful things often because they feel that that level of success should come from excellence they do not see in the product. They fail to see that it’s wide appeal, not excellence, that creates the highest levels of success.