Movies That Settle: Titanic

Does it settle like the ship at the bottom of the Atlantic?

I know I’m probably in the minority these days, but I still channel-surf on occasion. Although it’s more like Guide-surfing nowadays. There’s only a few channels out of the thousands that I (foolishly?) pay for that I actually care to watch, so I just check out on the guide what they are showing.

The other night, while perusing the Showtime offerings on the Guide, I saw that they were showing Titanic, the James Cameron disaster (In more ways than one) movie about the unsinkable ship and the tragic love affair of Jack and Rose. I watched a few minutes of it, mostly because it was the Kate Winslet boobie scene. Now, I have never liked this movie. I hated it in 1997 when it debuted, and I hated it in 1998 when I finally saw it in a theater. In fact, I kind of hated in 1996 when all I read about in magazines - printed magazines - was how the budget for this stupid movie was soaring out of control, but that it would somehow be worth it in the end. At the time, the $200 million dollar budget was a record. Now, a small indie movie costs about that. Still, I was quite unnerved that it soon became the highest-grossing movie of all-time, surpassing Jurassic Park, which was a movie I actually liked, and still do.

But the other night, after I watched a few agonizing minutes of Titanic and grumbled to my wife about it, she reminded me that I do this with some movie every few years, and this was not even the first time that I had done this with Titanic. I will, probably too often, watch a movie that I previously couldn’t stand just to see if i was being too critical and see if it actually does have merit. The logic being that at my advanced age, I am generally less cynical and more forgiving than I was in my reckless, angry, stupid youth. It almost never works out that way, although last year I realized that I didn’t hate Quantum of Solace as much as I remembered when I first saw it. So, it happened once.

I usually do this with movies that are incredibly popular, or movies that I was looking forward to and was then unbelievably disappointed by. Titanic was definitely the former, so I have sometimes checked out parts of it because, really, how can so many people who loved it in 1997 be wrong? And since the movie is 25 years old, and we’re almost at Valentine’s Day, let’s take a deeper dive into it:

I’m not going to give a plot synopsis, because everyone knows it, and knew it going in (The boat sinks! Hundreds of rich a-holes die, and so do the poor people who couldn’t get on the lifeboats thanks to the rich a-holes!), but I’ll hit a few of the high points. It was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, and won 11, both achievements tying records. It was the first film to surpass $1 billion at the box office, and the second film (After Cameron’s Avatar) to surpass $2 billion after the 2012 3D re-release, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film that is "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," along with such films as Die Hard, Forrest Gump, and the W.C. Fields classic, The Bank Dick.   

That’s all well and good for Titanic and the people who spent $200 million to make it possible, but I still think this movie stinks. The acting isn’t great, but I’ll give that a pass because it’s not like the actors had a great script to work with. The pacing is way off, and with a run-time of 3 hours and 15 minutes, you can imagine why. Even the make-up was a little weird, because Leo seems to be actually glowing at points. Maybe it wasn’t the make-up, though. Maybe it was  because he knew this was the one that would get him laid for the rest of his life.

I will say that it is a technical marvel for 1997. Watching the boat sink is pretty impressive when you remember that CGI wasn’t a regular thing back then. That part was really the only thing that held my attention back then, and it still holds up today. It’s also probably the reason that it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 89%. James Cameron may not make my favorite movies, but the guy knows what he’s doing when it comes to special effects. Side-note: Cameron is the artist for all of Jack’s sketches, including the one of Rose with the necklace. Apparently, that’s his hand drawing her in the actual shot in the movie. I’m not sure if that is admirable or kind of makes him a creep for staring at Kate Winslet nude for all that time. 

The RT audience score, however, is only 69%, which is still pretty good, but not what I expected. That score is apparently based on 250,000+ reviews, and let’s face it, most of the people leaving reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are probably not the target audience for Titanic. But there are a lot of very positive reviews on there, and one of them, in particular, caught my eye, from Tom B., left on January 20th, 2022 (maybe he caught it on Showtime like I did), who said, “Grew up with this film. This is one that will always be 100% in my books.” I don’t know how many books Tom has, but good on him. He liked this movie and probably always will. I don’t know how old he was when he first saw it, but he may have been a teenager and now here he is pushing 40 and remembering the good old days. And that’s the audience I want to talk about. Tom B and probably most sane people in the world didn’t care about what the movie cost to make, didn’t care that Leo supposedly snubbed the 1998 Oscar Ceremony because he wasn’t nominated for an acting award while everyone else was, and he didn’t care what the highest-grossing movie of all time is, was, or ever will be. He probably just remembers the experience of seeing the movie. Maybe he went with a date and got to make out afterwards. Whatever the circumstance, I don’t know Tom B. but I kind of admire him. (Now that I think of it, I hope he’s real. I mean, who is leaving reviews for Titanic on Rotten Tomatoes in 2022? I hope it’s not James Cameron using an alias.)

Basically, It’s impossible to discount the nostalgia factor when talking about this movie. It was literally everywhere. The Celine Dion song could not be avoided (Some radio stations even played one of those mixes that inserted dialogue from the movie into it. What was the point of that again?) I happened to be working alone in a video store the night that Titanic was released, and we had several VHS copies flying off the shelf, with some being the Letterboxed version. Most of the folks in my small town didn’t know what that meant, so I tried explaining it to every customer who was renting that one. I distinctly remember one guy declaring, “I don’t want no black bars, man,” so I told him he should go get the full-screen version. Is it any wonder I didn’t like this movie?

If you read the reviews, though, it seems like I’m in the minority, Like I said, however, I was not the target audience for Titanic. When I finally saw it, I had just graduated from college and was “kind of” single (Technically, I was dating someone, but we had pretty much stopped connecting months earlier. In fact, I saw it with another girl.) The only comparison I can really make from my own lifetime as far as cultural impact is Tim Burton’s Batman; an iconic film that I loved in 1989 and still love today, but if I was a cynical 22 year-old when I saw it, I might think it was pretty silly. That’s just how movies, and life, work sometimes. At least it gives me fodder for blog posts.

However, let us not discount the fact that it is very possible that Titanic is the first time a lot of people saw on-screen nudity, and that is a fond memory for any young man.

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