James Cameron
Titanic

As a child, I hated it because of the great clamor it caused upon release and the excessive passion my schoolmates had for DiCaprio. About fifteen years later, I watched bits and pieces and appreciated its social critique and the stigmatization of class differences. Now, twenty years after its release, I watched it again carefully; they aired it on TV in two parts.

While finding confirmation of the visual power in its technical and scenographic execution, I found it a clumsy film in many respects. It is certainly a tragedy that unfolds in all its meticulous complexity, but in many ways, we are faced with a coarse melodrama.

The characters are coarse: two-dimensional caricatures with one or two traits at most. The dialogues are baroque and sensational, with a lot of rhetoric from both the rich nobles and the poor folks. And the examination of social injustices, as commendable as it is, is stretched far and wide just to add more content to the mere catastrophic spectacle. But there isn't a particularly interesting authorial elaboration on these issues. At times, the selfishness of the rich prevails, other times the inclination towards humanity seems to prevail. In short, the vision is as chaotic as the sinking of the ship.

So, what remains is just the staging, truly grand, of the catastrophe, rendered with great precision in all its stages, indeed almost excessively rich and complex. Particularly evocative are the scenes in the lower decks of the Titanic, which progressively fill with water.

The style is maximally emphatic, as didactic as the script. Redundant music accompanies each segment of the story hyperbolically, to ensure nothing is missed by the viewer. Yet, the plots are certainly not subtle. We are faced with the simplest of love and rebellion stories against dusty parental impositions.

Therefore, despite benefiting from tangible special effects and little computer graphics, it is a film that anticipates and is somewhat a summation of many detrimental aspects of Hollywood blockbusters from the last two decades.

With more elegance, but also fewer points of pure fun and too much, way too much, syrup. A powerful cinema but rudimentary in its demands, repetitive, didactic. Two hundred million dollars wisely spent, with the aim of pleasing everyone, and so it was. But after twenty years, looking at it with clarity and detachment, one is less astonished by the grandeur of the catastrophe's staging and more bored by the pachydermic unfolding of the narrative. Great technical work in using the scenes and the water, but also many baroque embellishments. An emphasis that seems theatrical in certain dialogues, yet the drama of the sinking is well understandable even without annotations.

Jack's death disappointed everyone. Why? In my view, because the film did not set the necessary premises. The tragedy is there, but it was not foreseeable for the two lovers who manage to overcome infinite obstacles. It was unthinkable that one of the two would die after everything they endured to survive. You can't immerse us in two hours of water and stuff falling apart and then not even give the satisfaction of knowing they are safe. A rhetorical love story should have ended in an equally rhetorical way.

7/10