James Camer-thon: A Review of "Titanic", Part 2

"Jack, it's cold!"
"You know what else is cold? Dumping the diamond in the ocean when it could've paid your granddaughter's
tuition, bought her a house, a car, and sent all her descendants to medical school."

Happy Friday, and welcome to part 2 of my Titanic review as apart of James Camer-thon. Dust off that gold-boxed VHS #2, because we're in the second half of the movie, and have a plethora of behind-the-scenes stuff to talk about. You can re-review part 1 here if you'd like.

Let's crack this iceberg in half!--No... no... that doesn't work. Forgive me, it's early morning writing this and I'm only human.

When we last left... I don't know, "our heroes", so to speak... the ship struck an iceberg and Jack got framed for a crime he did not commit. Unlike Richard Kimble, Jack does not break free from captivity and set about the RMS Titanic looking to find the one-armed man that killed his wife, no no; with the ship sinking, Rose flees Cal and her mother, who has boarded a lifeboat. Rose finds and frees Jack, by haphazardly swinging an axe towards his hand-cuffed hands and, by the grace of James Cameron not wanting to make us ball our eyes out by watching a handless Jack scream while he bleeds out in freezing water, somehow cuts the cuffs and Jack free... and they barely make it back to the boat deck. Cal locates them on the boat deck, and he and Jack urge Rose to board a lifeboat. Having arranged to save himself, Cal falsely claims he can get Jack safely off the ship. As her lifeboat is lowered, Rose, unable to abandon Jack, jumps back on board. Ladies... remember the guy you knew for two days in high school? Would you abandon your get-off-a-sinking-ship free card for that guy? DOUBT IT. After angrily seeing Rose find true happiness in reuniting with Jack... Cal grabs Lovejoy's pistol and chases Rose and Jack into the flooding first-class dining saloon. They get away, and Cal realizes that he gave his coat, and consequently the necklace, to Rose; he later boards a lifeboat posing as a lost child's father. This would be a scumbag thing, but I like to imagine Cal is going to also take care of the child once they make it back to the mainland, but who am I kidding.

"Jack! The dining room is flooded!"
"No amount of freezing ocean water is going to separate
me from my hankering for CHICKEN WINGS!"

Jack and Rose return to the boat deck. The lifeboats have departed and the ship's stern is rising as the flooded bow sinks. As passengers fall to their deaths, Jack and Rose desperately cling to the stern rail. The upended ship breaks in half and the bow section dives downward. The remaining stern slams back onto the ocean... which is a horrendous way to go out if you're one of the little swimmers stranded in the water. Imagine swimming for your life and seeing a stern-half of a mighty cruise ship plummeting back towards you. No amount of repentance with God is going to save you from the death-blow you're about to receive. As the bow sinks, it pulls the stern vertical again before it, too, sinks.

... and now we come to the one of the biggest, most prevailing debates on the internet. In the freezing water, Jack helps Rose onto a wood transom panel among the debris, SUPPOSEDLY buoyant enough for only one person, and makes her promise to survive. Jack dies of hypothermia, and Rose is saved by a returning lifeboat, keeping her promise. This has been argued, and argued, and argued since 1997 and one wonders if the debate will ever day. Mythbusters did an episode on it, one which James Cameron laughably called something along the lines of "a total load of bullshit". It has been debated, and the verdict is out. On the National Geographic's special "Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron" which aired very recently... Cameron used SCIENCE and recreated the door scene, using a team of scientists, as well as two actors with sensors on their bodies who were the same body mass as Leo and Kate to determine hypothermia reaction and effects on the human body in those circumstances. After all this study, Cameron says "Pending a ton of variables, Jack could get into a place where if we projected that out, he just might've made it until a lifeboat got there. Jack might've lived, but there's a lot of variables." Science, bitch.

"Jack, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Actually I'm thinking about why they call her Unsinkable Molly Brown?
I'm sure if she struck an iceberg, she would sink for sure!"

Any who, back to the end of this three-and-a-half hour opus. The RMS Carpathia rescues the survivors; Rose avoids Cal by hiding among the steerage passengers and gives her name as Rose Dawson, ensuring she will remain hidden from him and her mother forever. Still crazy that meeting one boy for two-three days makes Rose change her entire identity and hide from her family forever... but I suppose that boy was 1997 Leonardo DiCaprio, so go figure. I don't know; ladies, again, tell me if that's feasible. On the deck of the Carpathia pulling into New York, Rose is still wearing Cal's overcoat, and she discovers the necklace tucked inside the pocket. Flash forward to 1996, the elderly Rose says she later heard that Cal committed suicide after losing his fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Lovett abandons his search, feeling like a rotten money-hungry scumbag after hearing Rose's story... HA, I knew it.

Speaking of being selfish with money... alone on the stern of Keldysh, Rose takes out the Heart of the Ocean, which has been in her possession all along, and drops it into the sea over the wreck site. Another classically debated bit in the movie. On the one hand, it's endearing she left the necklace that caused her such a nightmare on the ship in the water with the corpses of those she sailed with all those decades ago. On the other hand, I'm sure Rose's granddaughter, and great-grandchildren and future heirs and heiresses probably would've profited very nicely getting their hands on that jewel. Rose would've really helped her family with that one. Nope, like a selfish beanbag, she just tosses it in the ocean so her granddaughter Lizzy (Suzy Amis) could keep working as an accountant or some shit. Bogus! Finally, while she is seemingly asleep in her bed, her photos on the dresser depict a life of freedom and adventure inspired by her early conversations with Jack. A young Rose reunites with Jack at Titanic's Grand Staircase, applauded by those who died on the ship as we take one last look at the ship's skylight... and we fade to that BLASTED Celine Dion song and the end credits.

Show this picture to your next maritime travel
agent to fill them with existential dread.

So what did we learn today?... and last week? Combined? Well, first off I'll say Titanic is indeed a very powerful film. It is emotionally moving and tells a very sweet, if not a little far-fetched (again... ladies?) love story. Probably aside from Terminator and T2, it'll stand as the one James Cameron is best known for. It's an epic, in every sense of the word, and echoes that "epic" feel most films of the 1950s and 1960s had. See in the 1930s and 1940s, movies weren't very long. By the time the 1950s rolled around, films ended up with more runtime than they knew what to do with; wanting to upstage each other in terms of magnitude and gravitas. I mentioned a few in Part 1's review, so you get where I'm coming from here. As for production, this movie carries a plethora of behind-the-scenes factoids and tidbits that I'd love to share. *checks watch* Yeah, I've got time.

First off... I know with Marvel films, Harry Potter films, Star Wars films and similar franchises nowadays, breaking the $1 billion mark is no-hard task. In fact with inflation running as rampant as a crackhead in a pharmacy, it seems pretty damn easy to break $1 billion at the box office. Back in 1997-98, this movie stayed in theaters for so long and sold so many tickets it was downright astounding, and made headlines. In fact, due to the long theatrical run of the movie, Paramount Pictures had to send out replacement reels to theaters that had literally worn out their copies. The fateful day was March 1st, 1998, news broke that James Cameron's Titanic had become the first movie in cinema history to surpass $1 billion at the box office, in only seventy-four days of release. Cameron's next two films (which we will get to to close out James Camer-thon) saw similar feats in similar, short amounts of time. Truly the G.O.A.T.

"--and it was at this moment Mr. Guggenheim realized
that the jar of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" was, in fact,
butter."

Pertaining to historical accuracy, this movie plays fast-and-loose with characters and dialogue in some parts yet remains historically accurate visually pretty much everywhere else. The elderly couple seen hugging on the bed while water floods their room, in real life, were the owners of Macy's department store in New York, Rosalie Ida Straus and Isidor Straus, both of whom died on the actual Titanic. On the night the ship sank, Ida was offered a seat on a lifeboat but refused so that she could stay with her husband, saying, "As we have lived together, so we shall die together." There was a scene filmed that depicted this moment but was cut from the final version. It was Mrs. Straus who originally said "Where you go, I go" that inspired Rose's same line in the film. Rose also, as I mentioned in Part 1, flips Jack a Roosevelt dime... a questionable bend in the space-time continuum. She also at one point later gives Lovejoy the bird, which I'm not even sure was a gesture yet. I haven't done research on the origins of the middle finger though, so take that with a grain of salt.

As for sets and costume design, holy Moses this movie hit the nail on the head. I really do feel like I'm on the Titanic for the movie. It looks and feels like how I think the real ship would. The Oscar was definitely well deserved here... but boy it must've been stressful when it came to filming the sinking scenes. When the scene where a wall of water bursts through a doorway was first shot, Cameron said that the 40,000 gallons of water dumped into the corridor set were not enough, and asked for triple that amount. The set had to be rebuilt to stand up under the additional weight of water. Luckily, that hallway set was small, and while rebuilding it was tedious I'm sure... the grand staircase shot on the other hand must've been a set-design nightmare. The one near the end where the water comes crashing into the Grand Staircase, the filmmakers had only one shot at it because the entire set and furnishings were going to be destroyed. You think that's nuts? What about the stunt double for Captain Smith's infamous death scene? They straight-up KILLED that guy when they flooded the wheelhouse... just kidding, but you can imagine if that were true, though.

"Splish! Splash! I was taking a bath!"

I also want to very briefly touch upon the score real quick. James Horner's finest work if you ask me. The Titanic score has become so ingrained in pop culture. That woman's voice doing those vocal hooks rings in all of our heads. Probably even your head now as you're reading this. There's also a very tender piano medley that plays when the drawing scene. Rose's theme is also very tender. It all sounds the same, but tonally they all fit their scenes perfectly. Also, yes... that Celine Dion song. Which by this point has become a meme. I love Titanic's score, but that song is something else.

If nothing else, Titanic was a triumph of an underdog of a movie. It was doomed to fail by pretty much everyone and their mothers. Reportedly, Cameron forfeited his $8 million upfront director's salary and his percentage of the initial gross when the studio became outright distraught at how much over budget the movie was running; he would only receive a back-end percentage if the film did exceptionally well. He noted that initial compliments over the raw footage became more sparing over time as the costs spiraled out of control, and the studio heads at 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures "acted like they'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer" as the release date drew near. Even Cameron himself was at one point convinced that the film would bomb, and he would never work again; analysts had predicted a total loss of at least $100 million, so he could only hope to at least make a very good film. Imagine a movie you're making losing $100 million. Would you even see $100 million ever again? I don't think I'll ever see $100 million again. At one point, he ran into Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, my guess as a game of Croquet (or some other rich person's sport... Polo?) and told him "I guess that I'm not your most favorite person in the world, but the movie is going to be good". Murdoch simply replied "It better be a damn sight better than 'good'." The film's initial budget, roughly $135 million, adjusted for inflation in 2017 dollars, is closer to $208 million. The final production budget of $200 million, adjusted for inflation in 2017 dollars, is closer to $309 million... so you can see how people in 1995/96 were a little shall we say "on edge" at the notion of trying to make all that dough back. It was easily the most expensive movie to be filmed in the 20th century. This budget was bigger than the building cost of the actual Titanic, which cost $7.5 million in 1912, which equates to about $150 million 1997 dollars to build. So you can see how execs would've been a little anxious.

"Jim, if you're in the water like that you're going to freeze
to death!"
"What makes you say that, guys?"
"--you freakin' kidding me right now?"

Despite all of that, Titanic, again, surpassed the odds and became not only extremely profitable, but also critically acclaimed. At the 1998 Oscars, it took home eleven... ELEVEN, and I thought it was a big deal when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King did the same thing a mere six years later. That's huge, and famously as Jack Dawson did in his movie, James Cameron accepted the Best Picture Oscar at the end of the night by screaming "I'm the king of the world!"

Lastly... what do I think of Titanic? I enjoy it quite a bit. I don't mind the runtime, it seems to by very smoothly. I love the sets, the design, the feel of it. It's a very epic feeling-and-looking movie. The love story feels a tad hokey to me, and there's some decisions made by people in love that I question the logic on in the long run, ha, but overall it's a fun movie. As a chick-flick feel good movie, it works. As a disaster movie, it works. As a historical drama, it works. It just works across the board. My recommendation? Set aside a night, get with your significant other, turn the phone on silent, pop some popcorn and give it a go. If you feel, and have feelings... lol... you'll love it. Again, it may feel a tad hokey these many years later being meme'd like it has, but if you can look past that, you can see why it's considered the epic that it is.