Titanic Review

Two films are stapled together here, and only one of them is good. The romance is a bundle of stock parts, a spirited rich girl, a poor artist with a sketchbook, a fiance who twirls an invisible moustache while Billy Zane does what he can with him, and dialogue that is the weakest writing Cameron has put on screen outside of Pandora. The framing device with the elderly Rose exists to supply tears the drama has not earned.

Then the ship hits the ice and the film becomes something else entirely. Cameron stages the sinking as a two hour clock, compartment by compartment, deck by deck, with the class arithmetic of who gets a boat made plain without a speech about it. The stern rising vertical, the passengers falling and striking the propeller, the band playing, the old couple in bed, the water coming up the corridor, these are staged with a precision that documentary could not match. It is manipulative, overlong and enormously effective, and the eleven Oscars were not a mistake.