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‘titanic’: thr’s 1997 review.

On Dec. 19, 1997, James Cameron's epic set sail in theaters nationwide.

By Duane Bygre

Duane Bygre

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On Dec. 19, 1997, James Cameron’s Titanic set sail in theaters nationwide. The 193-minute blockbuster epic went on to dominate the 70th Academy Awards, nabbing 11 wins including best picture. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.

Paramount should replace that white mountain in its logo with an iceberg for the next several months. The studio will navigate spectacularly with its latest launch, Titanic , the most expensive movie ever created about what was once the largest moving object ever built.

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A daunting blend of state-of-the-art special effects melded around a sterling central story, Titanic plumbs personal and philosophical story depths not usually found in “event-scale” movies that, beneath their girth and pyrotechnics, often have nothing at their core.

Titanic , however, is no soulless junket into techno-glop wizardry but rather a complex and radiant tale that essays both mankind’s destructive arrogance and its noble endurance. 

Ultimately, we all know the horrible outcome of the Titanic sinking. We can recite the numbers lost and the awesome dimensions of the ship, and we can construct some sort of comparative scope for the catastrophe. But all these are mere quantifications and chit-chat regurgitation. 

Cameron, who wrote and directed the film, has put a face on that horrific happening; he has taken us beyond the forensics of the sinking and put us inside the skin and psyches of those who perished and those who survived. In both, we see facets of ourselves: In philosophical microcosm, Cameron shows that in the end — both the good and the bad endings — we’re all in the same boat.

Told in flashback as a single-minded fortune hunter (Bill Paxton) combs the Titanic’s wreckage with his state-of-the-art search ship in hopes of finding undiscovered treasure, the story is recalled by a 103-year-old woman (Gloria Stuart) who was a passenger on the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage. Drifting back to that time in April 1912, we see the trip through Rose’s (Kate Winslet ) 17-year-old eyes. 

High-spirited and betrothed to a monied mill heir (Billy Zane), Rose is, nevertheless, despondent. Like a Henry James heroine, she finds that she is not suited for life in the gilded cage that society is shaping for her as the baubled wife of a leisured industrialist. She foresees her life as being measured out by serving spoons, and she wants no part of such a stuffy existence. Her ennui turns to deep depression, and she nearly ends it by diving into icy waters, where she is saved only by the wise grace of a third-class passenger, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio ), whose joy for life and eagerness for living it to the fullest soon revitalize the young Rose. 

All the while, Cameron plants calamitous forebodings — the inadequacies of the life rafts, equipment shortages and the vanity of the ship’s creators and captain. Narratively, Titanic is a masterwork of big-canvas storytelling, broad enough to entrance and entertain yet precise and delicate enough to educate and illuminate. Undeniably, one could nitpick — critic-types may snicker at some ‘ 60s-era lines and easy-pop ‘ 90s-vantage hindsights  — but that’s like dismissing a Mercedes on the grounds that its glove compartment interior is drab. 

Unlike in most monstrosities of this film’s size and girth, the characters are not assembled from a standard stock pot. Within the dimensions of such an undertaking, Cameron, along with his well-chosen cast, has created memorable, idiosyncratic and believable characters. Our sympathies are warmed by the two leads: Winslet is effervescently rambunctious as the trapped Rose, while DiCaprio’s willowy steadfastness wonderfully heroic. On the stuffy side of the deck, Zane is aptly snide as Rose’s cowardly fiance, while Frances Fisher is perfect as a social snob, both shrill and frightened. Kathy Bates is a hoot as the big-hatted, big-mouthed Molly Brown — she is, indeed, indestructible. On the seamier side, David Warner is positively chilling as a ruthless valet. As the deep-sea treasure hunter, Paxton brings a Cameron-type obsessiveness to his quest. 

Also on the Oscar front, clear the deck for multiple technical nominations. Front and center is, of course, Cameron. A decided cut above other superstar directors in that he can also write, Cameron deserves a director’s nomination for his masterful creation — it’s both a logistical and aesthetic marvel. The film’s fluid, masterfully punctuated editing, including some elegantly economical match cuts, is outstanding: Editors Conrad Buff and Richard A. Harris deserve nominations, as does cinematographer Russell Carpenter for his brilliantly lit scopings ; his range of blues seems to hit every human emotion. 

Titanic ‘s visual and special effects transcend state-of-the-art workmanship, invoking feelings within us not usually called up by razzle-dazzlery . Highest honors to visual effects supervisor Rob Legato and special effects coordinator Thomas L. Fisher for the powerful, knockdown imagery. It’s often awesome, most prominently in showing the ship’s unfathomable rupture. The splitting of the iron monster is a heart stopper, in no small measure compounded by the sound team’s creaking thunders. Through it all, James Horner’s resonant and lilting musical score, at times uplifted by a mournful Irish reed, is a deep treasure by itself.  — Duane Byrge , originally published on Nov. 3, 1997.

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Titanic (United States, 1997)

Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic , you experience it -- from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie.

In each of his previous outings, Cameron has pushed the special effects envelope. In Aliens , he cloned H.R. Giger's creation dozens of times, fashioning an army of nightmarish monsters. In The Abyss , he took us deep under the sea to greet a band of benevolent space travelers. In T2 , he introduced the morphing terminator (perfecting an effects process that was pioneered in The Abyss ). And in True Lies , he used digital technology to choreograph an in-air battle. Now, in Titanic , Cameron's flawless re-creation of the legendary ship has blurred the line between reality and illusion to such a degree that we can't be sure what's real and what isn't. To make this movie, it's as if Cameron built an all-new Titanic , let it sail, then sunk it.

Of course, special effects alone don't make for a successful film, and Titanic would have been nothing more than an expensive piece of eye candy without a gripping story featuring interesting characters. In his previous outings, Cameron has always placed people above the technological marvels that surround them. Unlike film makers such as Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, Cameron has used visual effects to serve his plot, not the other way around. That hasn't changed with Titanic . The picture's spectacle is the ship's sinking, but its core is the affair between a pair of mismatched, star-crossed lovers.

Titanic is a romance, an adventure, and a thriller all rolled into one. It contains moments of exuberance, humor, pathos, and tragedy. In their own way, the characters are all larger-than- life, but they're human enough (with all of the attendant frailties) to capture our sympathy. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Titanic is that, even though Cameron carefully recreates the death of the ship in all of its terrible grandeur, the event never eclipses the protagonists. To the end, we never cease caring about Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Titanic sank during the early morning hours of April 15, 1912 in the North Atlantic, killing 1500 of the 2200 on board. The movie does not begin in 1912, however -- instead, it opens in modern times, with a salvage expedition intent on recovering some of the ship's long-buried treasure. The expedition is led by Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), a fortune hunter who is searching for the mythical "Heart of the Ocean", a majestic 56 karat diamond which reputedly went down with the ship. After seeing a TV report about the salvage mission, a 101-year old woman (Gloria Stuart) contacts Brock with information regarding the jewel. She identifies herself as Rose DeWitt Bukater, a survivor of the tragedy. Brock has her flown out to his ship. Once there, she tells him her version of the story of Titanic 's ill-fated voyage.

The bulk of the film -- well over 80% of its running time -- is spent in flashbacks. We pick up the story on the day that Titanic leaves Southampton, with jubilant crowds cheering as it glides away from land. On board are the movie's three main characters: Rose, a young American debutante trapped in a loveless engagement because her mother is facing financial ruin; Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), her rich-but-cold-hearted fiancé; and Jack Dawson, a penniless artist who won his third-class ticket in a poker game. When Jack first sees Rose, it's from afar, but circumstances offer him the opportunity to become much closer to her. As the voyage continues, Jack and Rose grow more intimate, and she tries to summon up the courage to defy her mother (Frances Fisher) and break off her engagement. But, even with the aid of an outspoken rich women named Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), the barrier of class looms as a seemingly-insurmountable obstacle. Then, when circumstances in the Rose/Cal/Jack triangle are coming to a head, Titanic strikes an iceberg and the "unsinkable" ship (that term is a testament to man's hubris) begins to go down.

By keeping the focus firmly on Rose and Jack, Cameron avoids one frequent failing of epic disaster movies: too many characters in too many stories. When a film tries to chronicle the lives and struggles of a dozen or more individuals, it reduces them all to cardboard cut-outs. In Titanic , Rose and Jack are at the fore from beginning to end, and the supporting characters are just that -- supporting. The two protagonists (as well as Cal) are accorded enough screen time for Cameron to develop multifaceted personalities.

As important as the characters are, however, it's impossible to deny the power of the visual effects. Especially during the final hour, as Titanic undergoes its death throes, the film functions not only as a rousing adventure with harrowing escapes, but as a testimony to the power of computers to simulate reality in the modern motion picture. The scenes of Titanic going under are some of the most awe-inspiring in any recent film. This is the kind of movie that it's necessary to see more than once just to appreciate the level of detail.

One of the most unique aspects of Titanic is its use of genuine documentary images to set the stage for the flashback story. Not satisfied with the reels of currently-existing footage of the sunken ship, Cameron took a crew to the site of the wreck to do his own filming. As a result, some of the underwater shots in the framing sequences are of the actual liner lying on the ocean floor. Their importance and impact should not be underestimated, since they further heighten the production's sense of verisimilitude.

For the leading romantic roles of Jack and Rose, Cameron has chosen two of today's finest young actors. Leonardo DiCaprio ( Romeo + Juliet ), who has rarely done better work, has shed his cocky image. Instead, he's likable and energetic in this part -- two characteristics vital to establishing Jack as a hero. Meanwhile, Kate Winslet, whose impressive resume includes Sense and Sensibility, Hamlet , and Jude , dons a flawless American accent along with her 1912 garb, and essays an appealing, vulnerable Rose. Billy Zane comes across as the perfect villain -- callous, arrogant, yet displaying true affection for his prized fiancé. The supporting cast, which includes Kathy Bates, Bill Paxton, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill (as Titanic 's captain), and David Warner (as Cal's no-nonsense manservant), is flawless.

While Titanic is easily the most subdued and dramatic of Cameron's films, fans of more frantic pictures like Aliens and The Abyss will not be disappointed. Titanic has all of the thrills and intensity that movie-goers have come to expect from the director. A dazzling mix of style and substance, of the sublime and the spectacular, Titanic represents Cameron's most accomplished work to date. It's important not to let the running time hold you back -- these three-plus hour pass very quickly. Although this telling of the Titanic story is far from the first, it is the most memorable, and is deserving of Oscar nominations not only in the technical categories, but in the more substantive ones of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress.

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Titanic Review: Reinventing Blockbuster Storytelling

• Jack Walters
• December 14, 2022

Thanks to its awe-inspiring set pieces and captivating romance, James Cameron’s Titanic remains just as powerful today as it was 25 years ago.

James Cameron’s Titanic was a complete box office sensation when it took the world by storm in 1997 , and ever since that point, audiences have been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is about this timeless tragedy that made so many viewers fall in love with the film. It’s entirely unlike anything that cinema had seen before , blending genres and styles from start to finish, creating a story that’s impossible to describe with words. Whilst the untimely deaths of 1,500 passengers might not immediately seem like a suitable backdrop for such a sentimental, emotional romance like this, Cameron proves several times over that love and tragedy can often be found hand in hand.

Titanic recounts the fictional romance between Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), two lost souls whose separate journeys converge onboard the Titanic, resulting in a fairytale romance that brings the pair together. The first 90 minutes play like any other love story – though much more captivating and powerful than you’d expect. Jack and Rose’s dynamic builds slowly over the film’s 190-minute runtime, preventing the story from rushing through anything. Thanks to Cameron’s expert storytelling and the exceptional performances of DiCaprio and Winslet, the dynamic between Jack and Rose feels much more natural and fluid than most on-screen romances. It’s a surprisingly simple story, but it’s this very simplicity that ensures Titanic works. The magic is found in the quieter, less sensational moments between Jack and Rose as they grow closer to each other and begin to learn more about themselves on this journey.

And yet, anybody can write a whirlwind romance – what makes Titanic really special is how quickly and effectively this romance transforms into a heartbreaking race for survival . Everybody knows the real-life story of how the Titanic scraped an iceberg and eventually sank in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but James Cameron uses this romantic backdrop and magical atmosphere to truly bring this unique disaster to life in a way that’s never been replicated on film before. From the second that iceberg appears on screen, Titanic transforms from a hazy, slow-paced romance into a thrilling adventure that forces the audience to come face-to-face with death and sacrifice on a gigantic scale. 

The final hour of Titanic includes some of the most intense filmmaking in James Cameron’s entire filmography, and more importantly, some of the most influential and impressive special effects ever put to screen. The film’s recreation of the Titanic’s destruction is flawless, and there are several moments that could genuinely be mistaken for real footage. Cameron uses a mixture of special and practical effects to create this claustrophobic atmosphere, paying attention to even the most indistinct background details in order to really bring the scene to life. There’s always something shocking happening on screen, whether it’s rooms collapsing, people drowning, or even passengers fighting the staff, everything is fully-developed to make this experience feel as suffocatingly real as possible . And all the while, Jack and Rose remain the focus of the story as they fight for survival and drive the narrative forward.

Before 1997, there had never been a film quite like Titanic , and that’s clearly reflected in its historic box office performance. In the 25 years since its release, the film has made over $2.2 billion internationally – which remains the third-highest lifetime gross ever recorded. In fact, Titanic sat at the #1 position for 12 years before James Cameron overtook his own record with Avatar . There are several theories surrounding why exactly Titanic gathered such insurmountable attention upon release, but whatever the reason, it’s clear that the film has something special. Without Titanic , the number of classic films that simply wouldn’t exist today is countless. James Cameron crafted an experience that needs to be seen to be believed , and that’s exactly why audiences returned to theaters so frequently to immerse themselves in this beautiful tragedy.  

Titanic is now available to watch on digital and on demand . The film will be re-released globally in theaters on February 10, 2022 in celebration of its 25th anniversary. Find out why Old Rose is important in Titanic .

• TAGS: James Cameron , Leonardo DiCaprio
• Films , Must Watch

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This “ Titanic ” arrives at its destination. A spectacular demonstration of what modern technology can contribute to dramatic storytelling, James Cameron’s romantic epic, which represents the biggest roll of the dice in film history, will send viewers in search of synonyms for the title to describe the film’s size and scope. The dynamic of the central love story, between a brash lad from steerage and an upper-class young lady bursting to escape her gilded cage, is as effective as it is corny, and will definitely help put the picture over with the largest possible public. This fast-paced three-hour extravaganza, which had its world premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival on Saturday night, is certain to do exceptionally well at the box office, and Paramount’s $60 million investment for U.S. rights on a $200 million-plus production has to be one of the bargain deals of the century. Whether Fox can come anywhere nearer to break-even in the rest of the world than the Titanic did to New York is another matter.

In telling the story of one of history’s most celebrated disasters, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic on her maiden voyage from Southampton on April 15, 1912, Cameron was clearly inspired by the challenge of reproducing the event with a physical verisimilitude and impact inconceivable in the numerous previous film and TV versions of the event.

At the same time, the writer-director, best known for his effects-laden sci-fi thrillers, has pushed a human drama, and an intense love story at that, to the forefront in a way he never has before. Result works as old-fashioned melodrama, even if one can’t quite say romance is now his forte.

Capitalizing on the 1985 discovery of the Titanic’s remains 2-1/2 miles beneath the surface in the North Atlantic, Cameron frames the period drama with contemporary action in which American explorer/opportunist Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) uses deep-sea submersibles to videotape and retrieve artifacts from the vessel. Opening sequence offers a ghostly partial tour of the encrusted “ship of dreams,” which Lovett hopes will yield him a bounty of hugely valuable diamonds he believes are on board.

Instead of finding any stones, however, Lovett does turn up an intriguing drawing of a young nude woman wearing a fabulous necklace, dated April 14, 1912. This discovery comes to the attention of a 102-year-old woman named Rose ( Gloria Stuart ), who in fact is the woman in the portrait and is summarily spirited to Lovett’s ship at the wreckage’s site to confirm details and, at length, to tell her story as it happened 84 years before.

First shots of the Titanic taking on passengers at Southampton are truly stunning, with the brand new ship representing the consummate triumph of the industrial age. Famously dubbed “unsinkable,” she was the biggest moving object ever constructed, built at a cost of $7.5 million. Cameron’s camera swoops up, down and around, taking in the masses from all classes crowding on board, but takes an immediate interest in two people: Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a haughty society girl returning to Philadelphia to marry her rich snob fiance Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and penniless, devil-may-care American Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who wins his ticket on the Titanic in a last-minute dockside card game.

The launch, on April 10, is an exciting wonder to behold, as the camera zips through all sections of the ship to amply reveal its luxurious extravagance as well as the rightful pride of its designer and crew. Planted early on is the suggestion that the wish of the company’s managing director, Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), to break the Atlantic crossing speed record led directly to his craft’s collision with an iceberg 400 miles off Newfoundland.

Surprisingly little time, however, is given over to the captain and those otherwise in charge of running the ship. As soon as they are under way, Rose does everything she can to rebel against her impossibly arrogant fiance and starchily class-conscious mother (Frances Fisher). Finally, feeling hopelessly trapped, she makes her way to the aft deck, where she is rescued from jumping overboard by none other than Jack, who has been admiring her from afar.

To repay him for saving his lady’s life, Cal is obliged to invite the scruffy dog to dinner at their first class table the following night, where Jack parries his snobbish hosts’ insults with as much style as he can muster. In return, he later spirits Rose off to third class, where they join in some spirited dancing with the immigrants, giving Rose more fun than she’s ever had in her life.

And so it goes with their schematic romance, with the upper-class girl freed from the stultifying restraints of her stiffly formal world by a resourceful, never-say-die, tousle-headed American Everyman. The formula at work here would have been right at home in silent melodramas, and it is to the credit of the vigorously spirited DiCaprio and the emotionally accessible Winslet that the relationship comes to life as engagingly as it does.

Deciding to reject her intended future life altogether, Rose asks Jack, who has made his living making sketches on the streets of Paris, to draw her in the nude wearing the invaluable blue diamond Cal has given her, an effectively intense and sensual sequence.

Chased hither and yon thereafter, they find the time and place to consummate their passion — American style — in the back seat of a luxury car in the ship’s hold before all hell breaks lose.

The Titanic hits the iceberg 100 minutes into the film, and the next 80 minutes represent uninterrupted excitement and spectacle. With a deathly quiet hanging over the ship at the midnight hour, the captain and crew swallow the quickly inescapable conclusion that the unthinkable has happened and the vessel is going to go down, just as some men on deck kick large ice chips around like soccer balls. Some first class passengers are irritated at the inconvenience of being evacuated from their quarters while water rushes headlong into the punctured front compartments of the ship.

Even at this point, however, Cameron steers his attention away from the general calamity to pile on even more complications for Jack and Rose, as the latter must discover where her vengeful fiance has had him locked up and then must make like a superheroine to fight her way through nearly submerged passages to rescue him. But Cal, who would only need an oily mustache to become the complete Edwardian-era villain, still isn’t finished, as he pursues Jack and Rose with a pistol even as freezing water is engulfing one and all.

This telling covers some of the classical ground: There were only lifeboats enough for half the passengers, and many of the 60-seat crafts went out only partially filled; first class patrons were given priority, as were women and children, while the steerage passengers were kept behind locked gates for a long time; some wealthy types sat stoically sipping brandy or locked in embraces with their mates, and a group of musicians continued to play soothing music to keep a lid on the panic. Still, the film misses a suspenseful beat by largely ignoring the presence of other boats in the vicinity and not indicating why they never made it to the Titanic.

The ship’s final plunge, as it breaks in two and the aft section rises up perpendicular to the black sea, is utterly stunning and effectively places the viewer in the jaws of death. The aftermath is possibly even more sobering, as hundreds of people are left in lifejackets bobbing in the frigid waters, shouting out but certain of their doom.

Much of this would not have been possible without the latest in digital special effects; their integration into the live filming is seamless, making all the extraordinary effort pay off onscreen. Technically, there is no question that the film is a wonder, and Cameron, production designer Peter Lamont, cinematographer Russell Carpenter, costume designer Deborah L. Scott, visual effects supervisor Robert Legato and the crew at Digital Domain represent only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of those hundreds of hands responsible for the exceptional-looking package.

DiCaprio and Winslet deliver all and more of what might have been expected of them, Kathy Bates tosses off some jolly jests as the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, and Gloria Stuart, a beautiful leading lady of the early sound era, is quite moving as the elderly woman who tells her intimate memories of the Titanic for the first time.

All others, however, are stuck with stock characterizations, and one wonders if Cameron could not have brought more depth and resonance to a few more of his characters. Quite annoyingly, the British here are little more than background players, signaling the notion that international blockbusters, regardless of setting, must be populated principally by Americans.

Quite a bit of the dialogue is peppered by vulgarities and colloquialisms that seem inappropriate to the period and place, but again seem aimed directly to the sensibilities of young American viewers. And Paxton’s crass crew on the explorer ship seem separated-at-birth from the meteorological crew in “Twister.”

As a nice contrast to the heavier accompaniment to the action footage, James Horner ‘s main theme has a liltingly melancholy Irish flavor.

Modern-day prologue runs 20 minutes, and is bookended with a seven-minute epilogue and seven more minutes of end credits, leaving the main drama with a 160-minute duration.

The Titanic story was filmed first, under the title “Atlantic,” by German director E.A. Dupont in 1929 for British Intl. in German and English-language versions with different casts, then in 1940, as “Titanic,” by the Germans as a piece of anti-British propaganda, albeit technically very impressive. 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. Two TV renditions came in “S.O.S. Titanic” in 1979 and “Titanic” in 1996.

• Production: A Paramount (in U.S.)/20th Century Fox (international) release of a Lightstorm Entertainment production. Produced by James Cameron, Jon Landau. Executive producer, Rae Sanchini. Co-producers, Al Giddings, Grant Hill, Sharon Mann. Directed, written by James Cameron.
• Crew: Camera (CFI color, Deluxe prints; Panavision widescreen), Russell Carpenter; editors, Conrad Buff, Cameron, Richard A. Harris; music, James Horner; music supervisor, Randy Gerston; production design, Peter Lamont; supervising art director, Charles Lee; art direction, Martin Laing; set design, Marco Niro, Dominic Masters, Peter Francis; set decoration, Michael Ford; costume design, Deborah L. Scott; sound (Dolby digital/SDDS/DTS), Mark Ulano; supervising sound editor, Tom Bellfort; sound design, Christopher Boyes; visual effects supervisor, Robert Legato; special effects, Thomas L. Fisher; special visual effects and digital animation, Digital Domain; additional visual effects, VIFX; associate producer, Pamela Easley Harris; assistant director, Josh McLaglen; second unit director, Steven Quale; second unit camera, Roy Unger, John Stephens, Aaron E. Schneider; special deep ocean camera system, Michael Cameron; Titanic deep dive camera, James Cameron; Halifax camera, Caleb Deschanel; stunt coordinator, Simon Crane; casting, Mali Finn. Reviewed at Paramount Studios, L.A., Oct. 31, 1997. (In Tokyo Film Festival.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 194 min.
• With: Jack Dawson - Leonardo DiCaprio Rose DeWitt Bukater - Kate Winslet Cal Hockley - Billy Zane Molly Brown - Kathy Bates Ruth DeWitt Bukater - Frances Fisher Old Rose - Gloria Stuart Brock Lovett - Bill Paxton Captain Smith - Bernard Hill Bruce Ismay - Jonathan Hyde Thomas Andrews - Victor Garber Spicer Lovejoy - David Warner Fabrizio - Danny Nucci Lizzy Calvert - Suzy Amis Col. Archibald Gradie - Bernard Fox

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Great movie, but too intense, racy for younger kids.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A person's worth is far greater than the station t

Jack and Rose transcend societal expectations and

Minimal racial diversity. Central female character

Rose is briefly struck by Cal. Violence and intens

One scene of a topless woman as she poses for a pa

The most commonly used swear is "s--t," repeated s

First-class passengers drink wine and champagne wi

Parents need to know that James Cameron's King-of-the-World saga Titanic is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time and is still sure to attract young teen and tween audiences. There's brief nudity (a topless Rose poses for a nude drawing, which is also shown throughout the film) and sexuality (Jack…

Positive Messages

A person's worth is far greater than the station they were born into. Themes include compassion and humility.

Positive Role Models

Jack and Rose transcend societal expectations and fall in love with each other, acting bravely to help save themselves and others. The "haves" for the most part -- excepting Molly Brown, the captain, and the ship architect -- aren't the most admirable lot. Many people onboard act selfishly, like Cal, who pretends a small child is his to get a spot on a lifeboat, or the man who refuses to allow his half-filled lifeboat to return to save more people.

Diverse Representations

Minimal racial diversity. Central female characters like Rose and Molly Brown are portrayed as strong, nuanced, and in charge of their own destiny, despite pressures around them to act otherwise. Early 20th century class conflicts are a central theme: Privileges of the wealthy are highlighted and criticized, ending with Rose choosing to be identified as a third-class passenger.

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Violence & Scariness

Rose is briefly struck by Cal. Violence and intense peril are concentrated toward the end of the movie, especially as the ship begins to sink: Mass chaos leads to fistfights, pushing, gun violence, even suicide. People plunge to their death in icy waters, some killed by falling debris from the ship. Almost everyone left in the water drowns. Close-ups of passengers who stay on the ship, preferring to await the inevitable in their rooms or lounges.

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

One scene of a topless woman as she poses for a painting, plus shots of that painting, as well as a few other nude drawings. Jack and Rose flirt, kiss passionately, eventually have sex. The love scene doesn't include any nudity, but the couple is sweaty, out-of-breath, bare-shouldered, on top of each other.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

The most commonly used swear is "s--t," repeated several times throughout. Other strong language includes one "f--k," "horses--t," "son of a bitch," "damn," "hell," "ass," "bloody," and several "goddamns," "oh my Gods," and other exclamations, especially toward the end. Insults include "slut," "whore," and "moron."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

First-class passengers drink wine and champagne with dinner. Men smoke cigars and drink brandy after dinner. Steerage passengers get drunk at a late-night party where beer is plentiful. Jack smokes cigarettes. Rose starts to smoke a cigarette, but her fiancé and mom stop her; she smokes one later after binge-drinking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that James Cameron 's King-of-the-World saga Titanic is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time and is still sure to attract young teen and tween audiences. There's brief nudity (a topless Rose poses for a nude drawing, which is also shown throughout the film) and sexuality (Jack and Rose make love in the backseat of a car), but the forbidden romance between the main characters (played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio ) is otherwise rather chaste by today's standards. It's the epic Titanic sinking scene that may make this movie too intense for younger kids. Throughout the mass chaos, people fight to save themselves ahead of others, plunge to watery deaths, and, in some cases, even die by suicide. Three incidents of gun violence take place during the sinking, with visuals of blood and depiction of suicide with a gun. On the flip side, characters display compassion and humility. The fact that this movie is based on a historical event may be too intense for sensitive children, but mature kids fascinated with the Titanic will find it compelling to watch. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (132)
• Kids say (737)

Based on 132 parent reviews

Not prepared for multiple references to suicide

Great movie and excellent source for discussions, what's the story.

Director James Cameron frames the story of the TITANIC in the late 1990s, when a high-tech underwater mission uncovers hidden treasures from the legendary ship, including a nude drawing of a beautiful girl. A 101-year-old woman (Gloria Stuart) reveals that she's the woman in the drawing, and viewers are then immersed in the events on board the ship from her point of view. She was Rose ( Kate Winslet ), a lovely young woman reluctantly engaged to one of the richest men on the ship, the cool and calculating Cal ( Billy Zane ). Unhappy with her engagement, Rose briefly considers launching herself overboard but is saved by the witty, handsome Jack ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a third-class passenger who won his Titanic ticket in a poker game. As Jack and Rose grow closer, Cal's jealousy swells, and he eventually frames Jack for stealing. When the ship hits an iceberg, everyone is thrown into a catastrophic, life-and-death situation where wealth and privilege are thrown out the window, relationships are tested, and courage is rare.

Is It Any Good?

One of the highest-grossing movies of all time, this enthralling saga achieved commercial and critical success, winning 11 Oscars out of its 14 nominations. The irresistible love story of Titanic stars two of the best actors of their generation; dazzling visual effects involve the most famous ship disaster of all time; a smug, rich villain is so easy to hate that he should be sporting an evil, twirling mustache; James Horner's score soars, coupled with Celine Dion's hokey-but-touching "My Heart Will Go On" theme; and there are fine performances by supporting actors like Kathy Bates as the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown, Frances Fisher as Rose's snobby mother, Bernard Hill (known best as King Theoden in that other epic, Lord of the Rings ) as Captain Smith, Victor Garber as the Titanic architect, and, of course, Oscar-nominated Stuart as the narrator, Old Rose.

Strong central female characters are the heart of Titanic , along with a look into the differences between social classes. Fans of romance will adore the journey of the star-crossed lovers, while action fans will appreciate the suspense and tension as the ship begins to sink. This is truly a film that has something for nearly everyone.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how in the face of catastrophe, people's true characters were revealed by their choices. How do different people on board the Titanic react to the ship sinking? Who were the bravest? Who were the most selfish?

Has society's emphasis on class changed since the time period depicted in Titanic ? What are other social considerations that divide people nowadays? How does Rose's life after the Titanic pay tribute to her brief love affair with Jack?

James Cameron is known for depicting strong, fearless female characters. If you're familiar with his other movies, compare Rose to Ripley ( Aliens ), Sarah Connor ( The Terminator ), and Neytiri, Trudy, and Grace ( Avatar ).

How do the characters in Titanic demonstrate compassion and humility ? Why are these important character strengths ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 19, 1997
• On DVD or streaming : September 10, 2012
• Cast : Billy Zane , Kate Winslet , Leonardo DiCaprio
• Director : James Cameron
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : History
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Humility
• Run time : 194 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language
• Last updated : February 13, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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December 19, 1997 'Titanic': A Spectacle as Sweeping as the Sea From the Archives The New York Times Front Page With Coverage of the Titanic Disaster (April 16, 1912) Related Articles The New York Times on the Web: Current Film Forum Join a Discussion on Movies By JANET MASLIN he long-awaited advent of the most expensive movie ever made, the reportedly $200 million "Titanic," brings history to mind, and not just the legendary seafaring disaster of April 15, 1912. Think back also, exactly 58 years ago, to the Dec. 19 New York premiere of another grand, transporting love story set against a backdrop of prideful excess, cataclysmic upheaval and character-defining trial by fire. Recall how that cultural landmark wowed audiences with its bravado, mad extravagance and state-of-the-art Hollywood showmanship, all fueled by one unstoppable filmmaker and his obsessive imagination. Just as David O. Selznick had Atlanta to burn, now James Cameron has a ship to sink, but he also has much more than calamity to explore in this gloriously retrograde new epic. Cameron's magnificent "Titanic" is the first spectacle in decades that honestly invites comparison to "Gone With the Wind." What a rarity that makes it in today's world of meaningless gimmicks and short attention spans: a huge, thrilling three-and-a-quarter-hour experience that unerringly lures viewers into the beauty and heartbreak of its lost world. Astonishing technological advances are at work here, but only in the service of one spectacular illusion: that the ship is afloat again, and that the audience is intimately involved in its voyage. What's more, Cameron succeeds magically in linking his film's young lovers, played enchantingly by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, with established details of the "Titanic" story. And let's not forget the offscreen drama: delayed release and outrageous costs made "Titanic" the joke of the summer. Now it's the movie of the year. Though the tender moments in Cameron's earlier films have mostly involved Arnold Schwarzenegger, graceful storytelling from this one-man army of a filmmaker (a director, a producer, a writer and an editor) is the biggest of many surprises here. Swept away by the romance of his subject matter, Cameron rises to the occasion with a simple, captivating narrative style, one that cares little for subtlety but overflows with wonderful, well-chosen Hollywood hokum. In its own sobering way, the film is forward-looking, too, as its early brashness gives way to near-religious humility when the moments of reckoning arrive. Ultimately a haunting tale of human nature, with endless displays of callousness, gallantry or cowardice, it offers an unforgettable vision of millennium-ready unease in the sight of passengers adrift in icy seas on that last, moonless night. That Cameron allowed flashlights into what should have been a pitch-black sequence is one of the rare times when "Titanic" willingly departs from established fact. Otherwise, with an attention to detail that goes well beyond fanatical, the film flawlessly recreates its monument to Gilded Age excess. Behind-the-scenes details here, which prove no less fascinating than Selznick's "Gone With the Wind" memos, include Cameron's having persuaded the original carpet manufacturer to make an 18,000-square-foot reproduction of its "Titanic" weave and his having insisted that every sign, uniform and logo for the Southampton sailing sequence also be created in mirror image, so that the camera could reverse the apparent direction of the nearly life-size model ship. Sets match old photographs right down to the sculpture and woodwork; costumes incorporate fragments of vintage clothing; even the silver White Star Line ashtrays had to be right. A core group of 150 extras worked with an Edwardian etiquette coach throughout the filming, furthering the illusion that the privileged past had returned to life. "Titanic" is no museum piece, however. It's a film with tremendous momentum right from its deceptive, crass-looking start. The story opens in the present day, with a team of scientist-cowboys (led by Bill Paxton) hunting for lost treasure amid the Titanic wreckage. Though Cameron made his own journey to the ocean floor to film amazing glimpses of the ship, he treats these explorers as glib '90s hotshots, the kind of macho daredevils who could just as easily be found tracking twisters or dinosaurs in a summer action film. "Oops, somebody left the water running," one of them wisecracks about the sunken ship. Then the film begins, ever so teasingly, to open its window to the past. A 101-year-old woman (played spiritedly by Gloria Stuart, an 87-year-old beauty who appeared in "Gold Diggers of 1935") hears of the expedition and says it has links to her own history. It seems that she, Rose, was the model for a nude sketch found by the present-day fortune hunters in a Titanic safe. It is the only thing of value to be retrieved there. The money in the safe has turned to mud. But where is the Heart of the Ocean, the egg-size blue diamond Rose wears in the drawing? Rose begins telling her story, and at long last 1912 is at hand. In an introductory sequence mounted on a colossal scale, Cameron shows the ship being boarded by its full economic range of passengers, from the haughty rich to the third-class passengers being checked for head lice. Young Rose (Ms. Winslet) arrives at the dock in the show-stopping plumage of Deborah L. Scott's costume designs, and in the unfortunate company of Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), the tiresome snob whom she has agreed to marry, largely at the urging of her impecunious mother (Frances Fisher). The Rose-Cal story line, which is the weakest part of the film thanks to Cal's unwavering odiousness, plays like Edith Wharton Lite. Meanwhile, in a nearby tavern, adorable Jack Dawson (DiCaprio) is winning a third-class Titanic ticket in a poker game. It won't be long before Jack is bounding happily into steerage, showing off the boyish adventurousness that makes him such a cure for what's ailing Rose. Aboard the ship of dreams, as the Titanic is often called here, Jack is one serious dreamboat. A bohemian artist (whose drawings were done by Cameron) who has spent the requisite time in Paris, he offers all the fun and flirtatiousness that Rose has been missing. This 20-year-old has also shown his share of worldly wisdom by the end of the story. It goes without saying that it's Jack, not Cal, who is the film's true gentleman. And that DiCaprio has made an inspired career move in so successfully meeting the biggest challenge for an actor of his generation: a traditional role. Among the many miracles of "Titanic" is its way of creating a sweet, life-changing courtship between Jack and Rose in the course of only a few days. At the risk of turning into a women's picture, "Titanic" brings these two together through a dramatic meeting, an invitation for Jack at a formal first-class dinner, a dancing romp among steerage passengers and even enough intimate moments to give the love story heat. Splendid chemistry between the stars, along with much color from the supporting cast and careful foreshadowing from Cameron, keeps the romance buoyant even after the dread iceberg gets in its way. Comfortable even in suggesting that the ship's lookouts missed the danger because they were busy watching lovestruck Jack and Rose, Cameron lets tragedy strike midway through the film. That way, the disaster can unfold in almost real time, with terrifying precision on a par with all the other details here. Not for "Titanic" the shrill hysteria of ordinary disaster stories; this film is especially delicate in its slow way of letting the gravity of the situation become clear. Much scarier than any explosion-filled caper film is the simple assessment from the ship's master builder, played with great dignity by Victor Garber: "In an hour or so, all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic." As Cameron joked during production, about a film that pitilessly observes the different plights of the rich and the poor, "We're holding just short of Marxist dogma." (A lavish "Titanic" coffee table book from HarperCollins is filled with fascinating data about the film, from the director's casual asides to accounts of the technological wizardry, like computerized hydraulics, that were devised for repeatedly sinking the ship.) By this point, the audience knows the ship so fully, from Cal and Rose's elaborate suite to the depths of the boiler room, that the film is on shockingly familiar territory as Rose searches every newly waterlogged area for Jack. Very much to Cameron's credit is the lack of logistical confusion. Indeed, the film's modern-day characters even watch a computerized version of how the ship split and then rose vertically just before it plunged straight down, events that are later re-enacted with awesome power. Despite all this advance information and the revelation that Rose lives to be 101, "Titanic" still sustains an extraordinary degree of suspense. Tiny, devastating touches -- how the same doll whose face rests on the ocean floor in 1996 is clutched in the arms of a pretty little girl who idolizes Jack, or a four-hanky coda seen in Rose's dream -- work as well as the film's big spectacle in giving the tragedy of "Titanic" its full dramatic impact. Though many of the story's minor characters are one-note (hardly the case with Kathy Bates's hearty Molly Brown or Bernard Hill's brave captain), the cumulative effect of their presence is anything but shallow. Beyond its romance, "Titanic" offers an indelibly wrenching story of blind arrogance and its terrible consequences. It's the rare Hollywood adventure film that brings mythic images of tragedy -- the fall of Icarus, the ruin of Ozymandias -- so easily to mind. The irony is that Cameron's "Titanic" is such a Titanic in its own right, a presumptuous reach for greatness against all reasonable odds. The film itself gambles everything on visual splendor and technological accomplishment, which is one reason its extravagance is fully justified on screen. But if Cameron's own brazenness echoes that seen in his story, remember the essential difference. This "Titanic" is too good to sink. PRODUCTION NOTES TITANIC Rating: "Titanic" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes partial nudity, one brief sexual situation, mild profanity and the soul-shaking sight of a great ship going down. Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Russell Carpenter; edited by Conrad Buff, Cameron and Richard A. Harris; music by James Horner; production designer, Peter Lamont; costume designer, Deborah L. Scott; special visual effects, Digital Domain; produced by Cameron, Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini; released by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. Running time: 197 minutes. This film is rated PG-13. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Gloria Stuart (Rose Dawson Calvert), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Bernard Hill (Capt. E.J. Smith), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews) and Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett).

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• DVD & Streaming
• Action/Adventure , Drama , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 19, 1997
• Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson; Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater; Billy Zane as Caledon 'Cal' Hockley; Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett; Gloria Stuart as Old Rose; Kathy Bates as Molly Brown

Home Release Date

• September 1, 1998
• James Cameron

Distributor

• Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

It’s a time of opportunity for Jack Dawson. A few nights ago he was sleeping under a bridge, and just look at him today! After a well-played portside card game, he ends up a passenger on a beautiful cruise liner, the ship of dreams, the Titanic. And he’s taking an ocean voyage back to America.

But even that serious stroke of luck doesn’t live up to what happens next: Out of the blue, he meets the girl of his dreams.

Who woulda believed it? She’s definitely out of his league. He’s a drift-about adventurer/part-time artist and she … well, she’s Rose DeWitt Bukater, a young beauty his pals would probably call highfalutin. But Jack just calls her … perfect .

Sure, she’s got a few problems—one of them being a smothering engagement to a wealthy, controlling snake named Cal Hockley. On the other hand, even though Jack would just as soon the snobby Hockley take a hike, he’s glad of him. ‘Cause the guy drove Rose right into his arms. Jack was at the right place at the right time and stopped Rose from doing something stupid. But that’s how fate works, right? Someone steps out on a ledge, and somebody else is there to help.

Opportunities arise.

And now, as he walks on the deck of this gorgeous ship—sun on his face, Rose on his arm—why, everything seems possible. When they land in America, they’ll run away together. Work their way around the world, owing nothin’ to nobody. This is the beginning of a whole new life for both of them. Can’t you feel it? Jack’s the king of the world!

(You did know that this movie is about the Titanic, right?)

Positive Elements

At the root of Jack and Rose’s relationship is the question of freedom. Rose is wealthy but so locked in to the future marriage that her mother and fiancé have devised that she feels completely without choice. The free-spirited Jack is penniless but has freedom and choice in spades. He continually tells Rose that she can have those things too—with or without him. Even in the most dire of times, when it looks like they both might perish, Jack spurs his love to fight for a life she can live richly. “You must promise me that you won’t give up. No matter what happens,” he tells her.

She doesn’t. In her old age, we see her appear to still be pining for Jack from across the years. But the camera also pans across her life that’s been captured in a series of photos, illustrating just how fully she’s enjoyed the years, her family and her children.

In the midst of the shipwreck disaster, Jack and Rose both put their lives on the line for each other and for those they come across in need. The film also takes the time to point to others on the ship who face their deadly circumstances with as much bravery and love as possible: A mother calms her children with stories of family and home. An elderly couple embrace and whisper words of love. Crewmen stay below decks aiding the stragglers, even as the waters rush in. And right up to the point of the final devastation, the ship’s string quartet plays comforting tunes and hymns to calm the frightened passengers.

Spiritual Elements

Passengers sing a hymn during an onboard service. The musicians play “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” A scared passenger is intoning “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death …” when Jack steps up behind him and snorts, “You wanna walk a little faster through that valley!?” A priest comforts passengers by reciting passages from Revelation. Long before, an overconfident man boasts that “God himself could not sink” the ship.

Elderly and frail, Rose passes away in her sleep, and we watch as her younger self walks up Titanic’s once again pristine grand staircase. She’s welcomed by Jack and all the other people who died.

Sexual Content

When Jack reveals to Rose that he’s a struggling artist, he shows her some of his sketches, including several female nudes that the camera studies closely. Then, as a sign of her rising independence, Rose requests that he sketch her in the same way. She walks out of her bedroom in a see-through black robe that shows her nakedness underneath. She then opens the robe, fully revealing her breasts and quite a lot of her midsection. As she reclines on a couch, posing for Jack, the camera returns repeatedly to a shot of her face and chest.

Rose’s reclining nude sketch subsequently becomes a central part of the story, and we see it several times. We also see a painting of Picasso’s that features abstractly rendered topless women.

Rose and Jack caress, kiss repeatedly and ultimately have sex in the backseat of a car in the ship’s cargo hold. Most of this interlude takes place offscreen; we see Rose place Jack’s hand on her clothed breast, saying, “Put your hands on me, Jack.” The camera returns to the panting and nearly naked couple afterwards.

Violent Content

Class distinctions are a big part of this film. So we’ll break the violence down into two classes: fisticuffs and full-on calamity.

Cal yells angrily at Rose, knocks their table over and grabs her roughly by the chin. He later viciously slaps her across the face. Cal’s valet punches Jack in the stomach. Men struggle for survival by pummeling one another. Rose punches a panicked crewman, bloodying his nose.

At about 100 minutes in, the Titanic hits the iceberg we all know is approaching. And for the next 80 minutes the disaster unfolds, breaks apart, gradually rises in intensity and then sinks below the icy waters. The terror is disturbingly realistic. Violent moments find panic-stricken passengers falling from great heights. They’re electrocuted, drowned or crushed by toppling smokestacks. A nervous armed guard attempting to control the crowd shoots a man, then kills himself.

When the ship’s stern is thrust high into the air, its weight causes the vessel to break in two—and crash down on the folks already flailing in the water below. Once both halves of the doomed ocean liner disappear below the surface, a lone lifeboat navigates the silent sea of dead, frozen bodies bobbing in the night tide.

Crude or Profane Language

“There’s no need for language, Mr. Huxley,” Rose’s mother tells her daughter’s fiancé. And though she’s absolutely correct, it seems the movie’s scriptwriters paid her no mind. Dialogue here contains an f-word, a dozen s-words and a handful each of “d‑‑n,” “h‑‑‑,” “a‑‑,” “b‑‑ch” and “b‑‑tard.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused more than 20 times. God’s is paired with “d‑‑n” at least 10. Regional profanities include the Irish/Scottish version of the American s-word and “a‑‑,” along with “b-gger,” “b-llocks” and “bloody.” Rose makes an obscene finger gesture.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The wealthy folks in first class are regularly seen smoking cigars and drinking champagne, wine or brandy. And when Jack steals Rose away to a steerage-class party, the partiers there are tossing back glasses of beer and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Jack and Rose share in all of the above.

A man drinks from a hip flask, and one beer drinker gets falling-down drunk. The well-known historical figure Molly Brown tells a story of her husband once coming home “drunk as a pig.”

Other Negative Elements

The big secret of Rose’s family heritage is that her father passed away leaving them nothing but debt. Rose’s mother uses that fact and several tons of guilt to try to force Rose into a loveless marriage that can save their family’s fortunes.

Cal accuses Jack of stealing a diamond necklace after having the jewelry planted in the young man’s pocket. When Rose reveals that half the people onboard are destined to die, Cal retorts, “Not the better half.” He calls Rose a “whore who runs to a gutter rat.” She spits back, “I’d rather be his whore than your wife!” Cal picks up a crying child and uses her as a way to claim an open spot on a lifeboat, even though the seats were intended for women and children only.

Jack and others gamble.

It cost the White Star Line $7.5 million to build the RMS Titanic. It cost Paramount Pictures $200 million to make a movie about it. It was a huge risk to launch a ship so big in 1912. It’s an even bigger risk to tell its story in 1997. Scores of books and movies had already come and gone before James Cameron latched onto the idea—the idea to tell a story that everyone who buys a ticket for or purchases a video of would already know what happens at the end. And I haven’t mentioned yet that the movie lasts 3 hours and 15 minutes. It took less time for the grim disaster to play out in real life.

But everything director James Cameron touches seems to turn to gold. And he made sure he packed his ship of dreams with quite a bit that’s worth watching. There are enormous and fantastically elaborate set pieces that lend a broad grandeur to the adventure. A Romeo-and-Juliet romance involves a brash scruff from steerage and an upper-crust beauty who longs to escape her gilded cage. You’ve got cowardice and arrogance, bravery and compassion. And he wraps everything up with one of the most spectacular, protracted disaster sequences every captured on film.

Those still considering whether or not to take this fated cinematic ocean journey—for the first time or the fifth —however, should also realize that there’s more to run into here than a single hull-slicing chunk of ice. Some of the death scenes are grisly. Some of the language is as icy blue as the frozen bodies floating in the water. And some of Rose’s clothing choices—or lack of clothing choices—go far beyond what you’d expect in this kind of film.

What do we learn, beyond fictionalized glimpses of the real history behind Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage? That the joys of freedom surpass those of wealth. And that selfless courage is a virtue almost beyond all others. But also that impulsiveness bests discretion. And that youthful love and desire should never be checked or shortchanged.

“This is crazy; it doesn’t make any sense,” Jack says in the midst of his impulsive sexual romp with Rose. She responds, “I know, that’s why I trust it.”

That kind of philosophy, grabbed onto like a life vest and lived out with the fervor we see modeled here, is guaranteed to hit a few icebergs of its own. Which is why Rose is wrong. We can’t— shouldn’t —completely trust it.

A 3-D UPDATE: Titanic was a huge film to begin with—both visually and at the box office. And the three-dimensional rendering (in April 2012, exactly 100 years after the actual ship sank) of the ship’s living grandeur and violent death heightens the sad story’s emotional impact even further. Whether it’s Jack and Rose standing on the bow, the ship’s mighty pistons plunging up and down or the broken hull slipping beneath the waves, watching Cameron’s cinematic take on the Titanic’s tragedy in 3-D detail reinforces the film’s already realistic feel.

Cameron says he felt little compulsion to reshoot any scenes for the big encore. He told Entertainment Weekly , “There is an impulse to want to revise it. But I think every film should represent the time when it was made—both the technology that was available and the state of mind of the filmmaker and the actors. I could have redone half the shots in the film and made them look better, but what’s the point? Everybody’s got to set their own ground rules for themselves.” He did, however, make one exception, though even the most eagle-eyed Titanic fans will be hard-pressed to spot it. Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson questioned the positioning of the stars in the night sky at the moment the ship sank, and he urged Cameron to correct them. Cameron responded, “‘All right, you son of a b‑‑ch, send me the right stars for the exact time, 4:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, and I’ll put it in the movie.’ So that’s the one shot that has been changed.”

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Titanic (1997) – A 25th Anniversary Review of the Epic Romance Movie

We're going back to Titanic. It's been 25 years, and we can still remember the magical experience of seeing it in theaters.

TITANIC  1997: 25TH ANNIVERSARY REVIEW

Twenty-five years ago, the beloved star-crossed romance and disaster film,  Titanic , premiered in wide release on December 19, 1997. And the world of movies was never the same! Love it or hate it, you’ve probably seen it – perhaps more than once…or twice…or…well, you get the picture!

Titanic  tells the story of Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a seventeen-year-old upper-class young woman who falls in love with Jack Dawson ( Leonardo Dicaprio ), a poor struggling artist. Unfortunately, they also fall in love on the Titanic – the doomed ship fated to sink.

Beyond that, the script weaves historical figures in and out with ease, creating the perfect historical fiction narrative.

What Makes  Titanic  Popular?

For many years,  Titanic  remained the number-one bestselling film of all time. Only for Director James Cameron to beat his own record with  Avatar . 

Today, even with the continual rise of ticket sales and unstoppable superhero films, it continues to  slay at #3 . Say what you will about his movies; James Cameron knows how to appeal to an audience. 

With  Titanic , the film’s epic, sweeping quality appealed to everybody, not just a niche crowd. Don’t care for the romance? Many watched the movie for the visual effects and the Titanic  disaster .

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However, it’s hard to pinpoint any one reason behind the film’s success. Instead, many ingredients of the historical drama led to the perfect recipe for success. James Cameron’s screenplay cleverly used old-fashioned storytelling techniques and familiar archetypes to quickly connect the audience to the story and characters with universal themes.

Beyond that, the star-crossed romance of the rich girl and poor boy – aka Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic – had universal appeal, not to mention the undeniable chemistry between Kate Winslet and Leonardo Dicaprio as Rose and Jack.

Plus, there were the groundbreaking visual effects, the beautiful costumes, the gorgeous, haunting musical score, and the original theme song, “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion. 

Sure, the song’s become overplayed, but if you objectively listen to it, the music is actually beautiful. On top of all that, the acting is top-notch, with characters you quickly love and root for. 

With the perfect blend of romance, humor, tragedy, and suspense,  Titanic  has you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

Titanic  1997 Review: The Epic Romance Movie Stands the Test of Time

So, 25 years later, does  Titanic  still work as a film?

It’s been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint.

Like older Rose looking back to the Titanic, I look back to the first time I saw the film. As a young girl filled with girlish dreams and idealism with a personality much like Rose, it was the perfect time to see the movie. 

RELATED: Movies Like Titanic: 50 Epic Romances to Fall in Love With

And I didn’t just see it once or twice. I saw it seven times in the theater! Something about the film appealed to my younger self.

And on a re-watch of the story all these years later, the movie still has that magic appeal so rarely found in movies today. From the story to the  epic romance  to the music, visuals, costumes, and more,  Titanic  doesn’t make a false step. 

Sure, not everyone loves this movie. But many of us do, as shown by its continuous success all these years later.

Overall, I can’t help but love  Titanic . Sure, there are a couple of cheesy scenes, and Leo calls out “Rose” a few more times than necessary, but who cares? James Cameron captured a sweeping, magical epic that tugs at the heartstrings. 

You laugh, cry, hold your breath in suspense, and start all over again. From award-worthy performances that turned the lead actors into bona fide movie stars to haunting visuals of the real Titanic, James Cameron’s passion project continues to soar. 

And overall, it’s a timeless, spellbinding tale that draws you in again and again.

Content Note:  PG-13 for sensuality, brief nudity, an implied lovemaking scene, some language, and a few intense sequences.

Where to Watch:  You can stream  Titanic  on Pluto TV. You can also rent/and or buy on Digital and DVD.

Did you love  Titanic ? How many times have you seen it in the theater? Do you have a favorite moment? Let me know in the comments.

Editorial Note:  This Titanic film review was first published as a Titanic 20th anniversary review in 2017 and has been updated for the 25th anniversary in 2022.

Photos: 20th Century Fox/Paramount Pictures

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Amber works as a writer and digital publisher full-time and fell in love with stories and imagination at an early age. She has a Humanities and Film Degree from BYU, co-created The Silver Petticoat Review, contributed as a writer to various magazines, and has an MS in Publishing from Pace University, where she received the Publishing Award of Excellence and wrote her thesis on transmedia, Jane Austen, and the romance genre. Her ultimate dreams are publishing books, writing and producing movies, traveling around the world, and forming a creative village of talented storytellers trying to change the world through art.

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2 thoughts on “Titanic (1997) – A 25th Anniversary Review of the Epic Romance Movie”

And here I thought no one could top my five visits to see Titanic. Ha ha! I haven’t seen it in several years but I did get to see Celine Dion sing that famous song this year in Vegas. It instantly brought back my memories of the film. It was just so epic and emotional. If you ever get the chance to visit the Titanic museum in Branson MO, it’s one of my very favorite museums. They have replicated in detail some of the film’s sets. Plus, it’s an interactive experience that makes the whole story more real.

Glad I’m not the only one who saw it numerous times! 🙂 I’m not sure how I convinced my mother to let me go over and over. Haha. Seeing Celine Dion must have been amazing! I’ve never been to that Titanic museum but it sounds interesting. I’ve been to a couple traveling museums that were fantastic. I also just went to the big Titanic museum in Belfast, Ireland where they built the ship. It was incredible. I’m actually quite interested in history which was also part of the appeal of the film for me. So, it was a fascinating experience.

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We're reprinting this today in honor of " Titanic " being re-released in theaters on February 10.

The new 3D version of "Titanic," like the original 1997 version, is a magnificent motion picture. The hour or more after the ship hits the iceberg remains spellbinding. The material leading up to that point is a combination of documentary footage from the ocean floor, romantic melodrama, and narration by a centenarian named Rose. The production brings to life the opulence of the great iron ship. Its passengers are a cross section of way of life that would be ended forever by the First World War. In a way, the iceberg represented the 20th century.

James Cameron's film is not perfect. It has some flaws, but I hate the way film critics employ that word "flaw," as if they are jewelers with loupes screwed into their eye sockets, performing a valuation. We can say there are elements that could have been handled differently. We can begin with some elements that are superb just as they stand.

To begin with, Cameron avoids the pitfalls of telling a story about which "everybody knows the ending." Yes, the Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks. That isn't the story he tells. He uses that as a backdrop for stories about hubris, greed, class conflict, romance and a misplaced faith in technology. The Titanic was doomed the moment it was described as "unsinkable." There is a chilling conversation on the bridge between Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner, and Thomas Andrews, its architect.

Ismay: "But this ship can't sink!"

Andrews: "She's made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty."

Its unsinkability perhaps explains why Capt. Edward John Smith ( Bernard Hill ), despite being warned of icebergs, cranked the ship up to its top velocity and left it speeding blindly through the night. Would the captain of any other vessel have felt confident in doing that? In another sense, many of those on board thought of themselves as unsinkable, including the millionaires Benjamin Guggenheim (Michael Ensign) and the fictional villain Caledon Hockley ( Billy Zane ). Guggenheim called for a brandy and went down with the ship. Hockley would have thrown women and children overboard to preserve himself. Also on board was the Denver millionaire Molly Brown ( Kathy Bates ), who survived and is known to history as the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She's shown as one of the few arguing that her lifeboat turn back to rescue passengers freezing to death in the icy water.

Here already I have fallen prey to Cameron's storytelling, and have become distracted from the ship's fate by the fates of those on board. Of greatest interest to us are Rose DeWitt Bukater ( Kate Winslet ), who is engaged to the snaky Caledon Hockley, and Jack Dawson ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a steerage passenger who falls in love with her onboard and saves her life. She is the same Rose, known now as "Rose Dawson," who is the old lady, the sole living survivor, brought on board a salvage vessel near the beginning of the film (she's played by Gloria Stuart, who was 86 when the film was made, and topped 100 before she died in 2010). This elderly woman, with such spirit and old, wise eyes, provides "Titanic" with what seems impossible: A happy ending. It is happy for her, at least, because she finds closure with the recovery of a drawing made by Jack and a final scene involving a famous diamond.

The Roses, young and old, provide a through-line from the day the ship set sail until the present day. She creates the psychological illusion that she's the heroine throughout, rescuing the film from a chronological timeline and providing an eyewitness for the crew on the salvage and exploration vessel. Cameron uses her as his excuse for an invaluable narrative device. He has the underwater explorers show her a little animated film that will "explain" to her how the ship sank, but actually explains it to us. This device is used all the time as a chalk talk or imaginary sequence in which the mastermind of a bank heist or prison escape explains the plan to those who will use it; he's really explaining it to us, so we'll understand it when we see it. As if there's not suspense enough when the ship is sinking, we're all the time wondering when it will break in half. Cameron is also not slow to bring the architect Andrews up to the bridge, so he can unroll his blueprints and explain to Captain Smith (and us) how the rushing flood waters will flow over one bulwark after the next.

The class differences onboard become a matter of life and death. The lifeboats are reserved for first class passengers, and those in steerage are locked below behind sliding gates. Crew members enforce these distinctions, sometimes at gunpoint; so loyal are they to their employers that, even though they're going to die, they feel no sympathy for their lower-class comrades. In an early scene, it is by sneaking up to the first class deck that Jack saves Rose from jumping off the ship. She has decided she prefers death to a life among affluent snobs like her fiancée; this shows she has more principle than imagination. Jack becomes the hero only because he flouts all class distinctions, a decision that has its roots deep in 19th century melodrama.

All of these matters take place in a ship created by art design, set construction, modeling, animation and miniatures which are state of the art. James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.

Now to those "flaws." Both of them involve the behavior of characters. There are several scenes involving Jack trying to help Rose escape the sinking ship, and then Rose helping free Jack after he's handcuffed to a pipe in a cabin, and then Jack again helping them to escape. Consider Rose. Of her own volition, she leaves the safety of a lifeboat and dashes back into the bowels of the ship to find Jack. She wades through water up to her waist, slugs an unhelpful crew member on the jaw, finds Jack, and then finds a fire ax to break the chain of his handcuffs.

Plucky, yes? But in all their other escape scenes, Jack pulls her behind him while desperately shouting Rose! Up here! Rose! Down there! Rose! Follow me! et cetera. This grows monotonous and tiresome. It reminds me of one of the early definitions in Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, the " Me Push-Pull You ." That's an adaptation of a friend of Doctor Dolittle's, the "Pushmi-pullyu." I define it as a male who treats a woman as a wee helpless creature who cannot save herself but must be pushed and pulled. Given Rose's behavior in finding her way through the flooding ship while saving Jack, she seems capable enough to be allowed the occasional Jack! Up here! (There is also the inconvenience that Rose and anyone else wading through the ice-cold water should quickly be dead of hypothermia.)

Another character I have questions about is Spicer Lovejoy, Caledon Hockley's pistol-packing bodyguard and dirty tricks man. Played by the superb actor David Warner , Lovejoy is a poker-faced tough guy entirely at the disposal of his boss. In the ship's desperate final moments, he is always at Hockley's side with helpful information, such as that a lifeboat on the other side of the ship is allowing men on board. Lovejoy is invaluable to the screenplay, because he gives Hockley someone to speak and plot with. Otherwise the dastard would be reduced to dashing about madly on his own. Nevertheless, whatever Spicer is being paid is not enough.

Now for the final flaw. It is, of course, the 3D process. Cameron has justly been praised for being one of the few directors to use 3D usefully, in " Avatar ." But "Titanic" was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D. What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance. So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw "Titanic?" No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.

But not quite. There's more to it than that. 3D causes a noticeable loss in the brightness coming from the screen. Some say as much as 20 percent. If you saw an ordinary film dimmed that much, you might complain to the management. Here you're supposed to be grateful you had the opportunity to pay a surcharge for this defacement. If you're alert to it, you'll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they'll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness. I know why the film is in 3D. It's to justify the extra charge. That's a shabby way to treat a masterpiece.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Titanic [3D] (2012)

Rated PG-13 For shipwreck scenes, mild language and sexuality

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson

Kate Winslet as Rose Dewitt Buckater

Billy Zane as Cal Hockley

Kathy Bates as Molly Brown

Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett

Bernard Hill as Captain Edward John Smith

David Warner as Spicer Lovejoy

Written and directed by

• James Cameron

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Titanic Reviews

Its character based storytelling approach draws you into the story, and by the time the ship begins to sink you’re thoroughly invested.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 27, 2022

It's standard Hollywood stuff, but Webb and Stanwyck are both in fine form, adding moments of humanity and emotional truth to the otherwise stilted surroundings.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 6, 2019

Titanic, the story of the great liner's first and only trip across the Atlantic, is a perfectly excellent picture, finely balanced between fact and fiction, stocked with plausible characters, working up quietly but strongly to its shattering climax.

Full Review | Jun 13, 2018

Though Stanwyck and Clifton Webb make for an unlikely married couple, this b/w Oscar-winning 1953 melodrama about the sinking of the famous liner is worth seeing.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 18, 2013

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 14, 2005

Not as big as James Cameron's computer-generated bonanza, but it's nonetheless impressive.

Full Review | Original Score: 76/100 | Jan 19, 2005

Exciting, well-acted version of the infamous voyage

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 7, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 20, 2004

Manages to tell its tale in a compact 98 minutes. That's nearly 100 minutes less than it took James Cameron, and there's something to be said for that.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 24, 2003

...a good motion picture despite its shallow, often sentimental overtones.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 24, 2003

fair enough

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 9, 2003

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Titanic Is Still the Purest Expression of Who James Cameron Is

As you might have heard, James Cameron’s Titanic reopened in theaters this past weekend. It even made some more money . This is a 3-D rerelease of the Oscar-winning 1997 epic, and what sets it apart from the previous 3-D rerelease (back in 2017) is that this time the film has been retooled with fancy new variable-frame-rate and high-frame-rate technology — the same “motion grading” that was utilized in Avatar: The Way of Water and the Avatar rerelease last September.

So how is Titanic with the 3-D and the variable frame rates? I couldn’t tell you. Titanic is one of my all-time-favorite films, but I’d rather remember it the way it was — the way it was produced and the way it looked when it made $1.8 billion, won 11 Oscars, and [ cue the swelling strings ] captured the hearts of millions, including myself.

At the same time, I don’t begrudge Cameron’s nerdy noodling with his greatest picture because this constant need to innovate has proven to be one of his great strengths as a director. Some filmmakers fall in love with the limitless possibilities of technology after some initial successes and disappear down deep, dark career holes (Robert Zemeckis and Ang Lee come to mind), but Cameron seems uniquely able to fuse his visionary side with his artistic one. We might say that Titanic is the purest expression of this.

At the time it came out, the knock on the film was that it was one-half corny love story and one-half stunning disaster flick. (Peter Travers of Rolling Stone famously put it on both his top-ten and worst-ten lists.) Many critics dinged Cameron for the clunky dialogue and (what they felt were) unconvincing performances — but they usually praised the second half, in which the ship goes down. The division did seem stark: The first half of Titanic feels at times like it was written by a lovesick teenager, while the second half feels like it was conceived by a sadistic engineer designing an ornate torture device.

While I understand these criticisms, I’ve never shared them. Because the structure of Titanic is the point of Titanic : It’s all about the collision between the snarky, tough-guy, tech-head ethos and the soft, the vulnerable, the emotional. We can sense this in the film’s opening scenes as Bill Paxton’s undersea explorer, Brock Lovett, utters flowery narration while holding a video camera up to a monitor display of the Titanic wreck. “It still gets me every time,” Lovett intones as Paxton’s resonant, grown-up-surfer-boy voice makes us wonder if he’s being remotely sincere, “to see the sad ruin of the great ship sitting here, where she landed at 2:30 in the morning, April 15, 1912, after her long fall from the world above.” Then his assistant breaks the spell, chuckling: “You’re so full of shit, boss,” he says, and the two men crack up.

Paxton’s character isn’t discussed much when it comes to Titanic , but he’s clearly a stand-in for Cameron himself, the cynical, high-tech treasure hunter who is about to have his heart broken by the story of an old shipwreck. We see the flip side of this just a couple of scenes later, when Cameron cuts away from the cool, steely hues of the salvage ship to find the aged Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart) in her cluttered, warmly lit, flower-filled home, where she’s working a potter’s wheel when she sees the TV report of Lovett revealing the discovery of a sketch of the young Rose. Here, then, are the two extremes of the picture, presented in pointed visual contrast, almost as if two completely different films have begun to bleed into each other.

This duality within Cameron of the hard-ass and the softy — which I already wrote about a couple of times last year — had always been evident in his work, but it really wasn’t until Titanic that the two sides seemed to take equal hold. In the director’s earlier films, the emotional and personal is often a powerful grace note beneath the action — whether it’s Ripley’s maternal instincts for Newt kicking in during Aliens (1985) or the sentimental turn the relationship between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Edward Furlong’s John Connor takes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Cameron did try to alter the mix in The Abyss (1989), which is a tough-as-nails action-thriller that transforms in its final act into an earnest tale of marital reconciliation (and then dorky, wide-eyed, underwater alien wonderment, but that’s a different story). The Abyss is an imperfect masterpiece, but the way that picture uses the tale of an estranged husband and wife’s renewed love for each other to undercut its own macho theatrics holds the seeds of Titanic , a movie that embodies the rift in Cameron’s soul as well as its reconciliation.

The director returns to this clash of sensibilities over and over again in Titanic . Hearing Rose’s story, Lovett and his men respond like engineers, obsessed with the mechanics of what’s happening. (“He figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big with too small a rudder. It can’t corner worth shit!”) Rose, meanwhile, focuses not on what objects do but what they evoke — the way she might look in a hand mirror she last handled 84 years ago or at an Art Nouveau comb she ran through her hair as a girl.

What does technology have to do with any of this? Obviously, the story of the RMS Titanic is, on a narrative level, a story of man-made grandiosity and hubris, a vision of progress and industry consumed by the ancient icebergs of the great ocean. And Cameron, in making a movie out of it with all the state-of-the-art visual effects that the money of two major studios could buy, knows that he’s working in the same tradition of deluded ambition and extravagance, ready to be undone by forces beyond his control. But he’s built that idea into the aesthetic of his film. The ship is destroyed by the forces of nature, of course, but also, the smart-aleck dudes who find the wreck are emotionally undone by the story of a doomed love affair. In Cameron’s world, these are essentially the same things: The Avatar movies, for example, are all about humans with superior machinery and firepower being defeated by Na’vi warriors who are in direct touch with the natural world — which includes not just oceans and forests and animals but also forces like love, constancy, patience, and family.

And Cameron knows to use technology for both sensation and emotion. For all the great effects in Titanic — all those impressive shots of the ship charging through the sea, not to mention the harrowing images of the vessel’s stern hanging in the air as CGI people drop off it — the one that always blows me away is far more intimate. In what is perhaps the film’s most transporting and romantic moment, our lovers stand tightly against each other at the bow of the ship. Jack tells Rose to close her eyes, and when she opens them, she feels like she’s flying through the waves. Framed by the light of an orange sunset, they look out at the blue expanse, their hands gently a-tangle, and kiss. But then, slowly, the shiny new ship around them transforms into a bleak, barnacled wreck, and blue darkness consumes them. The blending of the images is so gradual that young Rose’s shawl is left fluttering phantomlike in the depths for an instant before it, too, fades away. The camera then pulls back to reveal that we’re back in the present, looking at an image of that submerged, decaying bow on a monitor. It then pulls back further to reveal the aged Rose’s face, watching and remembering.

Here’s a scene that gains power as the image morphs before our eyes — a tender reminder that nothing lasts forever and that it all can pass in the blink of an eye. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her suddenly becomes an elderly woman with her whole life behind her. Cameron is rightly regarded as a showman who uses visual effects and cinematic technique to blow us away with action and spectacle. But it’s in his ability to also use such tools to quieter, expressive ends that is where he shows his true artistry. And I don’t think he’ll ever top Titanic .

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1 hr 24 min

Titanic Myths and Mistakes with Paul from 'History Rage‪'‬ Review It Yourself

• Film Reviews

Paul from the awesome History Rage podcast joins Sean to discuss Titanic film myths and mistakes. In a reversal from his usual hosting duties, where he listens to historians rage, Paul let's rip on Titanic (1997) describing it as: "The barely remembered, mostly made-up, bewildered ramblings of an incredibly wealthy woman who is trying to remember back to what happened 80 years ago". Discussion Points: -The shedload of myths which are crow-barred into Titanic films. -Sean still isn't happy with Julian Fellowes (2012) Titanic. -The myths surrounding third-class passengers. -The misconceptions of Edwardian Society. -The portrayal of First Officer Murdoch. -The trope of "evil Ismay". -The myth around the Titanic and it's speed. -Titanic (1943), the film made by the National Socialist Dictatorship of Germany. It is dreadful. Raised Questions: -Do you pray for Titanic (1997) to end once the ship sinks? -Did you know about the Quarantine rules onboard transatlantic ships in 1912? -Would you rather see Sean working as a seamstress? -Why doesn't Ruth DeWitt Bukater marry someone else? -Do you agree with Paul, that Titanic is vapid sh*te? -Did A Night to Remember (1958) do a better love story than Titanic (1997)? -Is cutting your mother's toenails a better use of your time than watching Titanic (1943)? Spoiler, yes it is. Check out other Titanic (1997) reviews by: -Seismic Cinema -SP Filmviewers Thanks for Listening! Review It Yourself is now on YouTube! Find us here: Twitter: @YourselfReview Instagram: reviewityourselfpodcast2021 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ReviewItYourself⁠ The PodPack Collective: This podcast is a member of the PodPack Collective. The members are as follows: Chatsunami (Trailer Included) Casting Views Nerdstalgic 2 Girls 1 Reusable Cup Review It Yourself Seismic Cinema Stop, Drop and Roll Initiative Weird Horizon The Game Club Podcast For further information, please follow the link: https://www.chatsunami.com/p/podpack-collective/

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Reader's Digest

20 Amazing Facts That Often Get Overlooked About the Titanic

Posted: April 6, 2024 | Last updated: April 6, 2024

The ship of dreams

One of the most famous disasters in history, the April 15, 1912, sinking of the RMS Titanic continues to captivate modern imagination over 100 years later. Its biggest fascination may be in that the Titanic represents so perfectly humans' hubris in the face of nature: The ship was an engineering marvel deemed "unsinkable," but it did just that after striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The Titanic's sinking, which occurred just a couple of years before World War I, also marked the beginning of the end of the glamorous and forward-looking Edwardian era, which as the 1997 movie Titanic showed, was also an era of class differences and repression. But as much as you think you know about this now-mythic ship, the Titanic continues to surprise us. We uncovered these little-known tidbits about the unsinkable Titanic you've never heard before.

Finding the Titanic was a front for a Cold War mission

Explorer Robert Ballard explained that looking for the Titanic in 1985 was actually a cover for his recently declassified mission to explore two sunken U.S. nuclear submarines. Ballard, who wanted to find the Titanic wreck, secured the funding from the U.S. Navy in exchange for completing research on the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, which coincidentally were located in the same general area. Plus, the search for the Titanic provided the perfect cover story. "They wanted me to go back and not have the Russians follow me, because we were interested in the nuclear weapons that were on the Scorpion and also what the nuclear reactors [were] doing to the environment," Ballard told CNN in 2018. The secret mission left him with only 12 days to find the Titanic afterward—which he did. Learn about 10 more secret U.S. government operations, revealed.

The Titanic had more than one fatal flaw

You may have heard of one of the design flaws in the Titanic was that the airtight bulkheads weren't totally sealed on top, allowing water to flow from compartment to compartment and eventually sinking the ship. But according to Scientific American , the ship was poorly designed in other ways as well. The steel of the ship's hull and the iron of its rivets fell victim to "brittle fracture" due to cold temperatures, high sulfur content, and high speeds. Because of this phenomenon, the steel basically shattered, and the rivets popped out easily—all of which sunk the ship 24 times faster than expected. Ironically, if the Titanic had hit the iceberg head-on instead of trying to avoid it and scraping it along the starboard side, the ship would have likely stayed afloat, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology . The ocean holds more mysteries scientists still can't explain .

The Titanic had real-life love stories

According to the Belfast Telegraph , there were 13 known honeymooning couples on the Titanic; perhaps the most famous was millionaire J.J. Astor and his young wife, who was five months pregnant. She was helped into a lifeboat by her husband, who later perished in the disaster. In the official Senate inquiry , one witness said Mr. Astor may have been allowed into the boat with his wife had the crew member known she was expecting. Mrs. Astor survived and her baby, John Jacob Astor VI, was born later that year.

The same Senate witness also recalled long-married couple Isidor and Ida Straus, who owned Macy's department stores and who both perished. "I had heard them discussing that if they were going to die they would die together," Archibald Gracie said in the inquiry. "We tried to persuade Mrs. Straus to go alone, without her husband, and she said no. Then we wanted to make an exception of the husband, too, because he was an elderly man, and he said no, he would share his fate with the rest of the men, and that he would not go beyond. So I left them there." This is what life was really like aboard the Titanic before it sank .

The first Titanic movie premiered just a month after the disaster

We're all familiar with 1997's Titanic , as well as possibly the 1958 film A Night to Remember . But the first movie about the disaster was released on May 14, 1912—exactly a month after the Titanic hit the iceberg. The silent film Saved from the Titanic starred actress Dorothy Gibson, who actually survived the Titanic in real life. According to the Los Angeles Times , she even wore the same clothes in the film that she was wearing on the fateful night: a white evening dress, long sweater, gloves, and black pumps. Although some critics praised Gibson's performance, others said it was too soon to capitalize on the disaster. Unfortunately, like the real Titanic, Saved from the Titanic was lost as well, as all prints of the film are believed to have been destroyed by a fire at the studio in 1914.

The last Titanic survivor died in 2009

Rose in 1997's Titanic was supposed to have lived until the age of 101; the real-life last survivor of the Titanic died at age 97 in 2009. According to the BBC , Millvina Dean, was also the youngest passenger on the ship, which she boarded with her parents and brother at just two months old. Although third-class passengers, she, her mother, and her brother escaped in a lifeboat, but her father went down with the ship. Before Dean's death, Titanic director James Cameron and stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio joined together to help pay her nursing home fees. The last survivor with a memory of the event, although she rarely talked about it , was American Lillian Asplund, who was five in 1912 and died in 2006 at age 99.

The Titanic is returning to nature

In the first manned submersible dive to the site in nearly 15 years, a 2019 expedition to the wreck of the Titanic found a rapidly deteriorating ship. Ocean currents, salt corrosion, freezing temperatures, and metal-eating bacteria are causing the ship to begin "returning to nature," as Park Stephenson, a Titanic historian told the BBC . "The captain's bathtub is a favorite image among Titanic enthusiasts, and that's now gone," he said. "That whole deckhouse on that side is collapsing, taking with it the staterooms. And that deterioration is going to continue advancing." You can see the damage for yourself in an upcoming documentary on the expedition, Mission Titanic , set to air on National Geographic this year. Find out about 13 of the creepiest things found at the bottom of the ocean .

Whether the Titanic should continue to be salvaged is up for debate

That's the dilemma currently facing a U.S. District judge, reports CNN . The company that holds the salvage rights to the wreck, RMS Titanic Inc., wants to recover the wireless telegraph transmitter used to send out the Titanic's distress calls before the relic is lost; but a recent agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom seeks to preserve the ship and prevent further salvage. The judge must decide whether there is sufficient educational, scientific, or cultural interest to warrant recovering the transmitter, which would involve cutting out a small piece of the ship to access the room where it's located.

It's also controversial whether tourists should visit

According to Smithsonian Magazine , fewer than 200 people have ever been down to see the Titanic—and it seems that recently, every time there's a proposed trip, technical or other difficulties arise to cancel it. Deep Ocean Expeditions stopped running their trips in 2012; OceanGate planned trips in 2018 and 2019 which were canceled but has another planned for 2021. For a whopping $125,000, you can join them; but the real price may be to the ship itself. Even expeditions that have a "look but don't touch" approach to visiting the Titanic may have unintentional effects on the site: Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard told National Geographic that evidence of these visits include ballasts left behind by subs, evidence of subs bumping into the ship, and trash dropped from boats on the surface. Find out the most incredible sea treasures ever found .

The Titanic site may hold human remains

Another reason why some experts argue the wreckage of the Titanic should be left alone is because the ship could be considered a final resting place and gravesite. Of the 1,500 people who died, only 340 bodies were recovered, with 1,160 remaining lost at sea. And although no one has actually seen human remains at the wreckage, photographs released in 2010 show clothing and laced-up shoes in positions that suggest bodies once lay there. It's also possible, reports the  New York Times , that preserved corpses remain inside the ship itself, where modern explorers can't see—but experts haven't come to a consensus on the issue. These other Titanic mysteries may never be solved either.

The Titanic II recreates the ship exactly

Perhaps a better way to show your reverence for the Titanic is by taking a voyage not to its wreck, but on a replica of the ship itself—with some modern updates, of course. Titanic II is not a sequel to the Academy Award-winning movie (although we always wanted to know more about survivor Rose's interesting life)—as reported by Scientific American , Titanic II is a new ship being built by Australian billionaire Clive Palmer that, after several delays, is now scheduled to set sail in 2022. Although it will have the latest technology and safety—including enough lifeboats for everyone—the ship will recreate the 1912 version in period detail, and even provide costumes for guests to wear.

A full moon may have caused the fatal iceberg to cross paths with the ship

Scientists arrived at a theory that the full moon months before could be to blame for the collision, which killed about 1,500 people. Quoting astronomer Donald Olson of Texas State University-San Marcos, National Geographic 's Richard A. Lovett wrote , "That full moon, on January 4, 1912, may have created unusually strong tides that sent a flotilla of icebergs southward—just in time for Titanic 's maiden voyage." This wasn't a normal full moon, though: "It was the closest lunar approach, in fact, since A.D. 796, and Earth won't see its like again until 2257," wrote Lovett. Iceberg theories aside, here are the  8 ghost ship mysteries that can't be explained .

Nearly eleven Titanic replicas could be built with the money James Cameron's Titanic movie has made worldwide

According to Money magazine, the Titanic cost about $7.5 million to build in 1912, which using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, would be about $197 million today. James Cameron's Academy Award-winning 1997 film Titanic earned nearly $2.2 billion worldwide —enough to construct about 11.2 complete replicas of the ship.

Research says an optical illusion prevented the ship from receiving help

British historian Tim Maltin believes that the atmosphere on the night of the sinking created conditions that made it difficult for the crew to spot icebergs—and for other ships to spot the Titanic .  Smithsonian magazine reported  back in 2012, "Atmospheric conditions in the area that night were ripe for super refraction, Maltin found. This extraordinary bending of light causes miraging, which, he discovered, was recorded by several ships in the area. He says it also prevented the Titanic ’s lookouts from seeing the iceberg in time and the freighter Californian from identifying the ocean liner and communicating with it." Atmospheric conditions are just one of the many times crazy weather changed history .

Researchers completed a map of the wreck site for the first time in 2012, using over 100,000 photos taken by underwater robots

The Associated Press reported in early March that a team of researchers completed "what's believed to be the first comprehensive map of the entire 3-by-5-mile Titanic debris field," a milestone that could lead to more insights as to what happened when the ship sank on April 15, 1912. "An expedition team used sonar imaging and more than 100,000 photos taken from underwater robots to create the map, which shows where hundreds of objects and pieces of the presumed-unsinkable vessel landed," wrote AP reporter Clarke Canfield. Though the site wasn't fully mapped until now, the Titanic 's wreckage was first discovered in September 1985 by underwater explorer Robert Ballard.

The sold auction price for the Titanic's final lunch menu: $88,000

Time reported the final sale price for the printed menu actually exceeded the auction house's expectations of $18,000. Abraham Lincoln Salomon, a New York businessman who was among the small number of first-class men who climbed onto a lifeboat, rescued the menu from the ship, according to CNN . The rich occupants of that lifeboat, dubbed the "Money Boat," allegedly bribed the crew to sail away even though it could have held more people. Another first-class passenger, Isaac Gerald Frauenthal, signed his name on the back of the menu: He may well have eaten the meal, which included grilled mutton chops and smoked sardines.

More than 5,000 other artifacts were also up for grabs

A huge collection of salvaged Titanic artifacts, which includes clothing, parts of the ship, and diamond jewelry, owned by Premier Exhibitions, was headed for the auction block in 2018, reported CNN . The collection of items was valued at $200 million, CBS News reported. But although a museum group tried for the collection, the BBC reports the artifacts actually went to a hedge-fund consortium. Items from private collections, such as those that have been passed down through survivor's families, have also gone up for sale. CBS News also reported a cracker from the ship sold for $23,000 in 2017, and a violin owned by the Titanic's orchestra leader fetched more than $1.4 million in a 2013 auction, one of 13 quirkiest items ever sold at auction .

Did an 1898 novella anticipate the Titanic disaster?

The plot of Morgan Robertson's Futility bears an uncanny resemblance to the events surrounding the sinking of the Titanic , published 14 years before the voyage. The book tells the story of the Titan: "The largest ship ever built, billed as 'unsinkable' by its British owners and the press, strikes an iceberg one April and goes down. Due to a lack of lifeboats, more than half the passengers perish in the North Atlantic," wrote the Portland Press Herald of the book's plot. Sound familiar?  Futility has since been renamed The Wreck of the Titan , and it's available for free on Google Books . If this book has you freaked out, you'll really be spooked by these other  historical predictions that were eerily accurate .

There was a cruise that echoed the Titanic experience

Leaving exactly 100 years after the Titanic began its ill-fated voyage, a 2012 memorial cruise made its way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where many Titanic victims were laid to rest, and later arrived at the spot in the Atlantic about 370 miles from Canada where the ship sank. According to an NPR reporter who was on board, the ship's horn sounded at the exact moment when the iceberg struck 100 years ago, at 11:40 p.m. on April 14; then sounded again when the ship sank below the surface at 2:20 am on April 15. A similar cruise, this one taking the ship's original route from England, seemed to have some of the Titanic's bad luck: It had to briefly turn back because a passenger had a suspected heart attack, reported the Daily Mail .

It's still one of the biggest local attractions and shows no sign of stopping

"Tragedy plus time equals tourism." That's what one Titanic expert and guide says, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer , and it's true! In 2017-2018 the Titanic Belfast exhibit recorded its busiest year to date since the tourist attraction opened its doors in 2012 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the Titanic was built and later began her ill-fated journey. More than 841,000 visitors walked through its doors during that period—a 13 percent increase from the year prior! And here's why we are still fascinated by the Titanic over a century later.

Even today, major ships still get "iced" by ocean bergs

Ships continue to struggle with icebergs to this day. In 2011, "an iceberg tore a hole in the hull of a Russian fishing boat cruising around the Antarctic. The 32-person crew threw cargo overboard to lighten the ship while waiting nearly two weeks for rescue," wrote Lauren Everitt for BBC News Magazine . In fact, research into Atlantic iceberg sighting records has shown that the number of icebergs floating into a ship's path has increased in recent decades partly due to climate change. As we all know by the shipwreck evidence and lost lives, the Titanic did actually sank, but these are the famous history moments that never actually happened .

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Review: TITANIC THE MUSICAL at Hale Centre Theatre

The production runs through May 11th at Hale Centre Theatre in Gilbert, AZ.

BroadwayWorld Guest Contributor David Appleford returns with his perspective on Hale Centre Theatre’s production of TITANIC THE MUSICAL.

The challenge a director faces when producing a large-scale musical designed to be seen on a proscenium stage and adapting it for a theatre-in-the-round presentation can often seem insurmountable. Not every show is going to work. Yet somehow, Hale Centre Theatre in Gilbert has proven time and time again how effectively it can be done.

Performing now at Hale’s theatre-in-the-round until May 11 is the gargantuan Broadway musical TITANIC , originally called TITANIC A NEW MUSICAL ,, now referred to as simply TITANIC THE MUSICAL .

Long before the show opened in ‘97, rumors regarding elaborate sets going wrong, hydraulics breaking down, a budget rocketing sky-high, and last-minute concerns that the show wouldn’t even open, had gossip mongers salivating. But the show did go on. It even swept the Tonys, winning all of its five nominations, including Best Musical. Reviews were tepid, mixed to good, and even though the show closed without turning a profit, the overall reaction from audiences was generally positive. It was the revival two years later in 1999 that earned the praise.

Streamlined from the original jumbo set design – those hydraulic pumps were now gone – the premiere in Los Angeles of the first national tour earned praise in much the same way that the revival of The Color Purple did once it eliminated its original scenic design and put the focus squarely on the performers. With Hale Centre Theatre and a forum that possesses no set or backdrops in the traditional sense, focus on the performers is even more concentrated, and it works incredibly well. Director Cambrian James has presented a unique retelling of the horrific event that occurred on April 15, 1912, when the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage hit an iceberg and sank in the middle of the Atlantic. A vessel that needed 54 lifeboats but had only 20 resulted in the drowning deaths of more than 1,500 passengers.

Writer Peter Stone has used facts and figures to keep the events of what occurred during those early hours of April 15 as accurate as possible. Because of that, a problem the book can’t possibly overcome is that there are no surprises. Due to films such as A Night To Remember plus the phenomenal global success of James Cameron’s film, the events as they happened are by now too well known and documented. We already know what’s going to take place and how.

But that doesn’t mean attention wanders. Aware of what lies ahead, the stupidity of the company owner, J. Bruce Ismay (Cameron Rollins) demanding more speed and trying to override a captain’s authority can’t help but induce an emotional response. And a steward telling 3rd-class passengers, “ You wait down here until you are told ,” as the water rises while the 1st-class are already climbing aboard the lifeboats will cause a similar sense of anger.

But among the high-drama, there remains the occasional moment of good humor. When third-class passengers talk of their hopes and dreams in America where they’re certain they can rise above their station, the pronunciation of American cities, names they have only seen in print but have never heard, are spoken literally. Albuquerque becomes ‘ Albie-cue-cue, ’ while Maryland becomes ‘ Mary-Land .’

That lack of worldly knowledge also extends to the 1st-class. At a dinner table when the recently married Madeleine Astor, a nineteen-year-old who has married a wealthy man twenty-nine years her senior, is asked how did she find Paris, she replies without any sense of irony, “ I didn’t have to. John knew exactly where it was. ” The line, as writer Peter Stone intended, is meant to show how guileless the young bride is. Being wealthy is not an automatic indication of knowledge and intelligence. The scene is usually portrayed with the youthful character possessing a look of concern as the older dinner table guests around her laugh at her innocence, but, as directed, the character laughs along with everyone else as if she had intended it to be a clever witticism. The moment, as presented here, misses the point.

And as often occurs in a Hale Centre Theatre production, some of the action is performed on a balcony above the entrance tunnel on the northwest side of the auditorium. While most seated in the round can enjoy the effectiveness of having the action from the ship’s bridge conducted on this elevated level, several audience members seated in that section have to either crank their necks to see or simply listen to what is being said, unable to view anything from their seated position. A climactic moment when the production’s one special effect takes place - the deck begins to lean forward as the ship eventually sinks - will be lost on those seated in a section of the theatre’s northwest side; they simply won’t be able to see it.

Like a 70’s disaster movie where over time you get to know certain individuals and become concerned with their fates, among the real-life characters of the ship’s designer (Tyler Thompson), its company owner, and the ship’s captain (Bryan Stewart), writer Stone has incorporated among the passengers characters representing the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-classes, many of whom were also based on their real-life counterparts. But they’re more snapshots of an assemblage rather than central figures; there’s no one person you’re with or get to know for any length of time. In other words, there’s no Kate and Leo, though amusingly, when it comes to the Irish 3rd-class down below in steerage, many of the women’s first names are Kate.

The cast of TITANIC THE MUSICAL  is a true ensemble. No one performer stands out more than the other. The real star of the show is Maury Yeston’s score. Like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd , Yeston’s TITANIC THE MUSICAL is operatic in style and epic in scope. Full-throated, inspiring robust voices fill the house.

In the way that radio is often referred to as a theatre of the mind, it’s in the mind of the audience where the full horrors of an enormous passenger ship, a floating city considered unsinkable, happens. There is no tilting of a stage, and no objects, such as a tea trolley eerily rolling from one side of the stage to the other, to be seen. Instead, the reality of what is happening is conjured in an audience’s mind by the behavior, the panicked dialog, and the superb singing voices of the large ensemble. Plus, a widescreen projection on the walls of the theatre’s east and west sides, displays time, dates, and settings, so that at any point in the show you know exactly where you are. The moment when the ship’s lookout declares, “ Dear Mother of God! Iceberg ahead! ” you’ll have goosebumps.

Hale Centre Theatre ~  https://haletheatrearizona.com/  ~  50 W. Page Avenue, Gilbert, AZ ~ 480-497-1181

Graphic credit to Hale Centre Theatre

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