Movie Review by Susan Sackett
Okay, Mensans, here’s a riddle. What word is both an adjective and a noun, the name of a movie and an apt description of its budget? If you said, "Alex, I’d like Titanic for $200,000,000," you get to keep your Mensa card.
Titanic easily lives up to its name. A megamovie made for megadollars about the megaship, this picture will no doubt go farther than its original namesake, which we all know hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and tanked on April 15, 1912. Billed as the most expensive movie ever made, Titanic will undoubtedly take in tidy sums at the box-office this Christmas, and will sail into even more lucrative waters when it hits the international market.
This film is a marvel. Writer-director James Cameron gives us a tale that is simple, yet three-tiered. The most familiar story involves the "unsinkable" luxury liner, Titanic, steaming along on her maiden voyage. I don’t wish to give away the ending, but… duh … it sinks, with 1500+ lives lost. No surprises here. This oft-told tale is but the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, for Mr. Cameron has given us two other wonderful stories woven into this cinematic tapestry. One concerns a series of flashbacks from the present day, as a survivor recounts her memories of that fateful trip while aboard a salvage ship enroute to the site of the tragedy. The other is an "upstairs-downstairs" love story of this same uppercrust woman (Kate Winslet) and the young lad from steerage (Leonardo DiCaprio) with whom she falls in love before their shipboard romance is interrupted by that pesky berg.
Watch for this movie to win lots of Oscars (at this writing, it’s been nominated for 8 Golden Globes), almost certainly one for Best Special Effects. And $200 mil buys a lot of great FX, some of the best ever put on film. For example, a 90% to scale model of the Titanic was built, as well as a "miniature" 45-foot version. The interior sets of the ship were duplicated right down to the dinner plates. Solid oak was used for all the interior woodwork. And so on.
Titanic runs 3 hours, 14 minutes, and the last hour or so, when the ship is sinking, runs almost in real time – the ship itself actually sank in a little over two hours. It gives you a true feeling of being there – don’t be surprised at times if you find yourself thinking you’re about to drown and gasping for air.
FOUR AND ½ OUT OF FIVE OWLS.