Titanic

Titanic

I KNOW.

HOW.

HOW COULD I HAVE NOT SEEN TITANIC UNTIL NOW.

Well, I never really wanted to watch it. I can remember the dual VHS edition sitting in my parents' video closet and thinking it looked boring, then seeing clips of it on TV as a teen and thinking it looked hilariously bad, and then never really needing to think about it again because it's so ingrained in popular culture that I felt like I already knew what I needed to know. However, after some positive persuasion, a very nostalgic trip to a local video store, and a spare three hours, I finally watched Titanic.

What's odd about this film is that on paper not a lot actually happens. A boy and a girl from different worlds fall in love with each other on a boat, her family disapproves, then the boat sinks. That's literally all that happens. So how does that story end up taking over three hours to tell? Mainly it's all the breathing room that James Cameron allows the movie to have, both in the Jack and Rose love story and in the massively impressive visuals. Jack and Rose have time to develop their relationship, so Jack meets Rose's family, they go to a rowdy party downstairs, they do sexy paintings, and they literally frolic around the boat being in love. Meanwhile, every action set piece is given lots of coverage and screen time to show off just how hard Cameron and his crew worked on this beast of a movie.

When it came to directing the visual aspects of Titanic, Cameron was notoriously meticulous and blunt in order to get his gigantic idea to look exactly like he wanted it to, which is why it looks so good. When it came to directing the actors and writing the screenplay, he just did a very very bad job. Everyone in this movie talks like a robot and acts like a robot. It's not quite The Room-level awkwardness, but it's still really poorly executed. The movie won 11 out of 13 Oscar nominations, but wasn't even nominated for screenplay, and the only two awards it lost were Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart for their acting nominations, which means even the Academy knew the writing and acting sucked. Jack and Rose don't have personalities beyond being young lovers, Billy Zane's character is so over-the-top evil that it's laugh-out-loud funny, and the rest of the characters are just bland and forgettable. Even the great Kathy Bates can't drag her nothing character out of the monotony of Cameron's writing. It's rough, but it's almost fascinating. It's very much what a big action movie director would think sounds like good dialogue, much like the Star Wars prequels.

While the acting and writing are the weakest elements of the film, the stunts, sets, costumes, and special effects are easily the strongest. Cameron made sure every visual aspect was historically accurate, and that ambition shows. Even the women's hats are absurdly detailed and fun to watch. Of course, the last hour with the actual boat sinking is the true visual feast, with the amazing flooded sets, advanced CGI, and stunts that still leave me wondering how they were able to accomplish them. But there's not a lot of actual emotional weight to it. There's a couple moments (such as the old couple in bed, the mother reading to her children, and the band that keeps playing) that are effective, but the large majority of the destruction feels pretty empty. It's amazing to watch, but it doesn't really hurt to watch, which is probably what it should be doing, considering this really happened. It's also worth pointing out that while the effects are great, the actual cinematography is pretty standard. Cameron was so concerned with what was in the frame that he forgot about the frame itself, so the cinematography is about as bland and forgettable as the characters in the movie.

My only other big gripe is Rose's final act before she dies, which is way more upsetting than the infamous letting-go that she does to Jack. She takes the Heart of the Ocean, a gem on her necklace that scientist Bill Paxton has spent three years of his life scouring the ocean floor to find, and she throws it back into the ocean for purely sentimental reasons. She threw away three years of a man's life for a dead person who had no personality when he was alive. Not cool.

So my big question after watching Titanic was probably the same anyone would have: Why was this movie such a phenomenon when it came out? It beat Jurassic Park as the new highest-grossing film of all time, and infected the whole world with Titanic fever. For me, it's the same reason Avatar ended up beating Titanic twelve years later: James Cameron is a great hype man. He's P.T. Barnum, a carnival barker the likes of which the world has never seen. He can pimp out a movie like no one else has the lack of shame to do, because he's not in the business of selling movies. He's in the business of selling an experience. He knows that everyone in the world has FOMO, so he advertises his movies like an event that you'd better see, otherwise you'll be missing out on what everyone's going to inevitably talk about and you'll be deeply embarrassed and ashamed of yourself for the rest of your life. Avatar 2 sounds like a surefire miss to me, but I'm sure he'll find a way to entice the world's population to crawl right back to that franchise through his Flavor Flav-level talk-up skills.

You've probably seen Titanic. If you haven't, it's worth checking out for technological and cultural reasons, but if you're looking for any sort of emotional depth or memorable characters, you won't find it here.