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A Chick Flick Disguised as an Action Film
Chaos In Print
Week of February 13, 2006
It’s always kind of amazing to go back and re-visit an incredibly popular
film. No matter how much loved they are in the time they are released…no
matter how many awards they win…they soon fade from public consciousness,
save for a few members of a fanatical cult following. And then, when you dig out
your dusty old DVD that you bought in the last spurt of mania over the movie, it
becomes a time capsule, reminding you of the time when the movie came out.
I’ve been going through this quite a bit lately, as I’ve been buying a lot of brand-
new special editions of these films. And the one I’m talking about specifically
seems to sum up the 1990s and its times: Titanic.
I remember reading the tale
of a woman who locked herself in a movie theatre and watched it for 5 days
straight.
Who could forget how crazy the world went for a gigantic historical epic
from the man who brought us the Terminator films? I remember reading the tale
of a woman who locked herself in a movie theatre and watched it for 5 days
straight. You couldn’t walk down the street without someone greeting you with
“My heart will go on” or “I’ll never let go.” And that stupid Celene Dion song was
played on the radio non-stop. Granted, its effect on pop culture is still being felt.
Here we are now, some 8 years after its original release, and just about every
idiot riding in a boat – from a tiny little fishing dingy to the mightiest of cruise
ships – has to stand at the bow and scream, “I’m king of the world!” Why was
this film so popular? Why is it still so popular?
I, personally, still enjoy the film purely as a technical achievement. James
Cameron, the writer/director, has always been one of those directors who seems
to pride himself on pushing the current technology to the limits, and creating the
new technology when the current fails. And he really went all-out with Titanic.
First, he actually dove to the wreck of the ship to film it, a process that required
actually designing and building a special movie camera to work at the ocean
depths. (Trivia note: those underwater cameras were designed and built by
Cameron’s brother Michael, an engineer.) From there, it was down to Mexico,
where he re-built 80% of the ship at full scale in a tank of water. And then, he
pushed the limits of visual effects technology at the time to actually make the
ship sail. Cameron developed and pioneered techniques that went into making
other historical epics, such as Gladiator and Troy. Special effects junkie that I
am, you just got to stand back and admire all that.
Granted, it’s not Attack of the
Clones cheesy, but it can get a little bad.
But the vast majority of the movie-going public isn’t nerds. They wouldn’t
as deeply get into the technical stuff like I do. And watching it again after all
these years, the film has more than its fair share of flaws. Some of the romantic
dialogue in some scenes is rather cheesy. Granted, it’s not Attack of the
Clones cheesy, but it can get a little bad. And I, personally, have always had a
few problems with the scale of the Titanic. In some scenes, it’s positively
massive. In other scenes (generally the ones involving the full-size ship they
built), it just seems…smaller. But still we can overlook that. What makes Titanic
work?
Firstly, the characters. You can’t deny that there are some pretty likable
characters. Who doesn’t want to live the life of Jack Dawson, a simple vagabond
artist, travelling the world? And we all sneer at Cal Hockley, our dastardly villain
who wants to put the lovely Rose into a life of servitude. There were lots of good
characters who were cut, too. In the deleted scenes, we see that there was a
very minor subplot concerning Titanic’s radio operators. (“They were the
computer nerds of their era,” says Cameron on the commentary.) Plus, you
know, naked Kate Winslet.
It is,
quite simply, the Disney animated formula writ large.
But I think that Titanic endures because of the simplicity of its plot. It is,
quite simply, the Disney animated formula writ large. Rose is our plucky
princess, who is trapped by her position and dreams of high adventure out there.
Jack is our Prince Charming who can show her that world. Cal is the dastardly
villain who wants the princess for his own, and he’s even got his snivelling
henchman in the form of Mr. Lovejoy. All you have to do is turn Molly Brown into
a talking animal, throw in some musical numbers, and Titanic is a Disney
animated movie.
And that’s it. At the end of the day, Titanic is the fairy tale that we all
want. We all want a Jack who’ll take us away from all this, or Rose that we can
save. It’s a simple archetype that’s been in stories for centuries, and Titanic is
the latest interpretation of it. The massive, $200 million backdrop is just for a
simple love story.
The cult of Titanic has now faded somewhat. It’s been fun revisiting it
with its brand-new 3-disc special edition. But now, it goes back on the DVD
shelf, to sit again, gathering dust, waiting to be rediscovered once more.
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