{"id":9543,"date":"2010-07-14T16:20:27","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T00:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=9543"},"modified":"2010-07-14T18:37:35","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T02:37:35","slug":"titanic-james-cameron-1997-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=9543","title":{"rendered":"Titanic (James Cameron, 1997): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Vee Rice<\/a>. Viewed on DVD.<\/p>\n

\"\"Watching James Cameron\u2019s Titanic<\/a><\/em> (1997) for the first time, at the tender age of 10, I was overcome with love for Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his determination to save Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) \u201cin every way that a person can be saved.\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately for Cameron, that charm does not hold up upon viewing the film 13 years after its theatrical release.\u00a0 Now the film seems overcompensating and trite.\u00a0 James Cameron transforms the epic story of an ill-fated ship into the over told story of an ill-fated romance, but, he does it with \u201cstyle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regrettably, the film is hardly about the disastrous voyage.\u00a0 Instead Cameron encases a romance between two fictional characters of different classes in the historical background of a tragic journey.\u00a0 Not that the theme is uncommon; films such as A Very Long Engagement<\/em> (2004) and Pearl Harbor<\/em> (2001) also utilize tragic historical events to ground a fictional love story.\u00a0 Had Titanic<\/em> not faked interest in the\u00a0artifact of the ship itself, I may have forgiven this downfall; however, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his exploration of the RMS Titanic surround the context of the story as he scavenges the ship for a rare, expensive diamond known as the Heart of the Ocean.\u00a0 After a failed attempt at recovering the relic, he meets 101 year-old Rose, the last person known to be wearing the jewel.\u00a0 Although Brock does not recover the gem, his team restores a drawing of a beautiful, young, naked woman wearing nothing but the diamond in question, who happens to be Rose, herself.\u00a0 From there, she tells the story of the ship\u2019s doomed maiden voyage, and the love that found her along the way.<\/p>\n

The film boasts as audacious of claims as the boat itself did in the 1910s.\u00a0 The sets are lavish and striking, and the costumes are highly romantic.\u00a0 Jack cleans up handsomely in \u201cThe Unsinkable\u201d Molly Brown\u2019s son\u2019s dress clothes and his hair slicked back, as he prepares to meet with\u00a0the ship\u2019s elite for dinner.\u00a0 Rose\u2019s memories introduce us to a typical dinner for upper class: an ornate flat leading to a polished wooden grand staircase; at the bottom, an open flat filled with lavishly dressed people, and then an elegantly dressed Jack practicing his greetings.\u00a0 He greets her with a kiss on the hand (\u201cI saw that in a nickelodeon once and I\u2019ve always wanted to do it.\u201d) and takes her arm in his.\u00a0 Rose\u2019s dinner gown is phenomenal: a red evening dress with a fully beaded net overlay; it is classic extravagance.\u00a0 It is also one more aspect of the film that, while aesthetically pleasing, screams over-kill<\/em> as much as the number of deaths accrued on the \u201cunsinkable ship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why did he even make Titanic<\/em>?\u00a0 We all know the end of the story: the RMS Titanic<\/em> sinks; the History Channel has been telling us that for years.\u00a0 Maybe Cameron just wanted to be \u201cKing of the World\u201d and created a film so ludicrously ostentatious he could not be forgotten for it.\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Who could forget the grandiose sinking of the ship sequence that lasts for half of the film?\u00a0 The panic sweeping through the multitudes of passengers and staff, the forlorn captain and crew, the desperate Cal, the water sloshing down empty halls and stairwells as sparks fly from short-circuiting lights, and Rose and Jack frantically engaged in their survival\u2014together.\u00a0 The sets and special effects are high and the storyline is over familiar, but somehow the monstrous hit was the highest grossing movie of all time until Cameron outdid himself in 2009 with the even more ridiculously pretentious Avatar<\/em> (shot in 3D, of course).\u00a0 I guess that is why Titanic<\/em> is now scheduled for re-released in 3D.\u00a0 After the successful transformation of Tim Burton\u2019s Alice in Wonderland<\/em> (2010) and M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s The Last Airbender<\/em> (2010) from 2D shooting to 3D post-production, Cameron decided the conversion process is good enough for his precious Heart of the Ocean to get her second chance to sail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Vee Rice. Viewed on DVD. Watching James Cameron\u2019s Titanic (1997) for the first time, at the tender age of 10, I was overcome with love for Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his determination to save Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) \u201cin every way that a person can be saved.\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately for Cameron, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":170,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/170"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}