IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched on Disney +
James Cameron is an avid fan of oceanography. He can even count himself among the few people who have dived down into the West Pacific Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench - the deepest point of the world's oceans, the last unexplored territory of our planet. It seems only logical, given this circumstance, that Cameron also has a distinct fascination with shipwrecks and their salvage: everything that the sea has swallowed up in its intimidating grace is there to be explored. So who, if not James Cameron, should venture into such storied material as the sinking of the RMS Titanic? Of course, 1997's "Titanic" is not the first film adaptation of the disaster of April 14, 1912, when the legendary passenger ship collided with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 people.
However, James Cameron is responsible for the ultimate film adaptation - and in pretty much every respect. Not only has he taken the possibilities of computer technology - not for the first or last time - to a new level. Above all, he literally revolutionized blockbuster cinema as it was at the time, because the pronounced use of CGI effects did not take place in order to transport the viewer into a fantastic screen adventure in which, for example, the long-extinct dinosaurs are allowed to present themselves alive and kicking again - in "Titanic", realism comes first. Or rather, the authenticity that allows us not only to see the three-hour epic, but also to experience it with every pore of the body as a sensory experience.
Certainly, Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" is also a lesson in sweeping blockbuster magic and remains the prime example of the escapist forces that 90s cinema can bundle or uncover. "Titanic", however, has a much more striking drop height, because James Cameron takes the historical background into account, although of course a certain amount of witnessed slapdash is still guaranteed. Exemplary for this can already be taken the two main characters, Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), which of course mean purely fictional character constructions. The synthesis of frame and interior narrative, however, lends "Titanic" an emotional grandeur that James Cameron more than does justice to in the course of his thoroughly polished dramaturgy as well as the impressive audiovisuals: "Titanic" is cinema of boundary-pushing grandeur.
Carried out on two temporal narrative levels, we are drawn into the extensive experience and memory protocol of the 100-year-old Rose (Gloria Stuart) - and what awaits us is nothing less than one of the greatest love stories, which visibly wraps itself in the garb of one of the greatest tragedies. While James Cameron's detail-manic reconstruction of the magnificent Titanic may undoubtedly be a technical tour de force, its immersive brilliance distills the box-office phenomenon (no one could have predicted a box-office take of $1.8 billion) from the fluid transitions of individual plot connotations and staging spectrums. Of course, "Titanic" is not to be understood merely as an oversized romance or a gigantic recreation of a devastating accident, but nonetheless as a social cross-section that analyzes the gender roles of men and women just as much as the social injustice within the class system observed on the lower and upper decks.
In addition to illuminating the gap between rich and poor, which will assume downright perverse proportions in the chaos of the paralyzing doomsday scenario, "Titanic" also reveals itself as a far-sighted story of initiation and emancipation: Rose will free herself from the bourgeois shackles imposed on her and subvert the expectations that have always been placed on her in order to effect a redemptive first step toward self-determination. When the opulent disaster continuously increases in its oppressive hopelessness from minute to minute, James Cameron once again reveals his genuine mastery as a filmmaker: it is by no means the moments of startled turmoil, of deafening noise, of oppressive panic that will burn themselves into the minds of the viewers. It is the silence that is fully draining as a consequence of the catastrophe. The bodies that drift stiffly frozen in the ice water of the North Atlantic.
"Titanic" is without a doubt a dazzling exception within the high-budget cultural landscape. Such a passionate, rousing, stimulating and in every respect touching experience is truly unique. James Cameron recurs to the primordial stimuli of cinema, thus defining "Titanic" of course not insignificantly through its givenness as a (fairground) attraction, but is so modern that he does not rest on the imposing show values, but allows every emotional emotion its appropriate resonance space: love and pain, both are allowed to ignite them in overpowering form and establish their very own iconography. The ship of dreams, whose demise was more than a mathematical certainty, is in the next step both the upsurge of unfiltered, visually powerful emotions, as well as the justification of today's star persona of Leonardo DiCaprio, who effortlessly made the leap from poster boy to character actor.
