Search Search powered by YAHOO!


register
You are not logged in.

Log in »

Subscribe to weekly newsletter »

(blog) »




on sale now

Titanic (1997)

Printer-friendly »
E-mail this to a friend »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

"To describe Titanic as the greatest disaster movie ever made is to sell it short. James Cameron's recreation of the 1912 sinking of the "unsinkable" liner is one of the most magnificent pieces of serious popular entertainment ever to emanate from Hollywood."
-- Joseph McBride, Boxoffice Magazine (1997)

"His canvas is so massive, you never know where to look, and when you look back over the whole, none of it looks like much -- and this is the Titanic we're talking about, the stuff of ballads and legends. Titanic sure looks like it cost $200 million -- the sets and costumes are lavish, and the ship sure is big -- but there's no magic or poetry in sight.... The ship herself is one of the most tragic romantic figures in all of history. Against all her best intentions she let people down. She didn't mean any harm, and yet, after all traces of her passengers and crew are gone, she's the one left sitting lonely at the bottom of the ocean. The last thing she deserves is to be plundered by the likes of James Cameron."
-- Stephanie Zacharek, Salon (December 17, 1997)

"Titanic is not 'important' -- except in commercial terms. The only startling thing about it is the centrality of its love story. Instead of making a disaster movie with a thread of romance, Cameron has made a romantic movie in which a fictional love affair is heightened by disaster. The picture is about the big ship as memory and desire. It's about the things that died on the morning of April 15, 1912 -- an earlier form of technological hubris, the class system of pre-World War I England and America. It's also about what was born -- not just love but a new spirit in women."
-- David Denby, New York Magazine (December 22-29, 1997)

"I suppose there's something faintly ridiculous about a $200-million movie that argues on behalf of true love over wealth and even bandies about a precious diamond as a central narrative device -- like Citizen Kane's Rosebud -- to clinch its point. Yet for all the hokeyness, Titanic kept me absorbed all 194 minutes both times I saw it. It's nervy as well as limited for writer-director-coproducer James Cameron to reduce a historical event of this weight to a single invented love story, however touching, and then to invest that love story with plot details that range from unlikely to downright stupid.... To speak about the artistry of Titanic rather than its economics is to assume that the audience's pleasure counts for more than the investors' bank accounts -- hardly the assumption that rules the current discourse about the movie."
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (1997)

"... [T]he movies were invented to give us vicarious experiences like this.... You could say that Cameron's film -- a fictitious love story of a rich society girl and a poor Irish painter, set in the midst of the Titanic's tragic voyage -- is overblown, a travesty of the truth. And, of course, you'd be right. But so what? Cameron is not really making a realistic film, though the trappings of the truth and history float constantly around the edges of his grand fancy. He gives us instead a wild romance and a supreme cliff-hanging melodrama, laced with thrills, shocks and ecstasy. Titanic is a fantastic experience: one that steeps you in grandeur and terror as you watch it."
-- Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune (December 19, 1997)

"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."
-- Janet Maslin, The New York Times (December 19, 1997)

"Tales of this film's agonizing gestation and tardy birth, though already the stuff of legend, will mean little to moviegoers, who will pay the same $7 or $8 to see Titanic that they spend on films made for a thousandth its cost. Ultimately, Titanic will sail or sink not on its budget but on its merits as drama and spectacle. The regretful verdict here: Dead in the water."
-- Richard Corliss, Time Magazine (December 8, 1997)

"Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well. The technical difficulties are so daunting that it's a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion. I found myself convinced by both the story and the saga. The setup of the love story is fairly routine, but the payoff -- how everyone behaves as the ship is sinking -- is wonderfully written, as passengers are forced to make impossible choices."
-- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (1997)

"A lush and terrifying spectacle of romantic doom. Writer-director James Cameron has restaged the defining catastrophe of the early 20th century on a human scale of such purified yearning and dread that he touches the deepest levels of popular moviemaking."
-- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (1997)

"I guess that for audiences overfed with scrappy independent films and Seinfeldian cynicism, Titanic quenches a deep thirst for old-fashioned spectacle and sentiment. So now when Titanic comes up, instead of contradicting my friends or risking their contempt by saying Leonardo DiCaprio can't be called 'sexy' until he goes through puberty, I hold my tongue and change the subject..."
-- Jess Cagle, Entertainment Weekly (1997)

"It's quite possible that Titanic is one of the greatest romantic epics ever filmed. It's also possible -- to a slighter degree, to be sure that it's a turkey.... Cameron has filled his Titanic with simulations of everything that the big ship carried except human beings. You'll be awestruck and impressed with what happens to the people in his film, but you might be hard-pressed to remember their names when it's over."
-- Shawn Levy, The Portland Oregonian (December 19, 1997)




in theaters
on dvd