When I first read Walter Lord's magnificent "A Night To Remember" in 1978 at the age of 9, I began a love affair with the story of the Titanic and her people that continues to this day, and it is partly responsible for my being a professional historian today. It is because of that, that there have been few nights as disappointing to me as the one and only time I saw this movie.
Yes, the technical details are brilliant, but the bottom line for any movie must be its story and characters and the manner in which James Cameron exploited the tragedy of the Titanic to tell a cheap, third-rate story of horny teenage lust that is far worse than the tawdry soap opera of the 1996 CBS miniseries "Titanic" continues to offend me to this day.
It is not the fact that James Cameron told a fictional story at the expense of compelling real history like the Californian incident that offends me so much, it's the fact that this is a *bad* fictional story. No one aboard the real Titanic had a situation remotely resembling the one of Jack and Rose. Why couldn't Cameron have told a fictional story revolving around something real and representative of what was on the Titanic? If he wanted to do a class barrier romance, then why not have Jack be an honest Irish immigrant out to make a fortune in America (as so many of Titanic's steerage were) instead of some loser-drifter in life who couldn't make an honest living in the real world beyond Titanic? (Jack strikes me as the working class Gaylord Ravenal. Someone who in ten years is going to be just as bad as Cal is) Or better still, why not a story of a young newlywed couple that was parted by the tragedy? God knows there were plenty of those couples aboard Titanic, but I guess in this day and age of Hollywood morals, "true love" can not exist between a married couple, thus rendering that idea politically incorrect in James Cameron's eyes. And so we get the false dichotomy in which a person's capacity to love is measured by his poverty, a message that is not only stupid in and of itself but also false to the reality of what was on Titanic (one need only point to the true love that existed between the Strauses, who perhaps not coincidentally had all their key scenes left on the cutting room floor).
There is so much more I could rant about (the demeaning depictions of First Officer Murdoch and Molly Brown also come to mind), but the bottom line is that as a Titanic enthusiast I feel disgusted that James Cameron has hijacked any hope that one day someone could make a movie about the Titanic with modern technology that did justice to her, just as "A Night To Remember" so brilliantly did in 1958. For me, "A Night To Remember" and the 1979 TV-movie "SOS Titanic" remain the definitive Titanic movies and should be seen as antidotes to this horrid mess.
Yes, the technical details are brilliant, but the bottom line for any movie must be its story and characters and the manner in which James Cameron exploited the tragedy of the Titanic to tell a cheap, third-rate story of horny teenage lust that is far worse than the tawdry soap opera of the 1996 CBS miniseries "Titanic" continues to offend me to this day.
It is not the fact that James Cameron told a fictional story at the expense of compelling real history like the Californian incident that offends me so much, it's the fact that this is a *bad* fictional story. No one aboard the real Titanic had a situation remotely resembling the one of Jack and Rose. Why couldn't Cameron have told a fictional story revolving around something real and representative of what was on the Titanic? If he wanted to do a class barrier romance, then why not have Jack be an honest Irish immigrant out to make a fortune in America (as so many of Titanic's steerage were) instead of some loser-drifter in life who couldn't make an honest living in the real world beyond Titanic? (Jack strikes me as the working class Gaylord Ravenal. Someone who in ten years is going to be just as bad as Cal is) Or better still, why not a story of a young newlywed couple that was parted by the tragedy? God knows there were plenty of those couples aboard Titanic, but I guess in this day and age of Hollywood morals, "true love" can not exist between a married couple, thus rendering that idea politically incorrect in James Cameron's eyes. And so we get the false dichotomy in which a person's capacity to love is measured by his poverty, a message that is not only stupid in and of itself but also false to the reality of what was on Titanic (one need only point to the true love that existed between the Strauses, who perhaps not coincidentally had all their key scenes left on the cutting room floor).
There is so much more I could rant about (the demeaning depictions of First Officer Murdoch and Molly Brown also come to mind), but the bottom line is that as a Titanic enthusiast I feel disgusted that James Cameron has hijacked any hope that one day someone could make a movie about the Titanic with modern technology that did justice to her, just as "A Night To Remember" so brilliantly did in 1958. For me, "A Night To Remember" and the 1979 TV-movie "SOS Titanic" remain the definitive Titanic movies and should be seen as antidotes to this horrid mess.