A review of Titanic and how it stacks up against Roy Ward Baker's 'A Night To Remember'

A review of Titanic and how it stacks up against Roy Ward Baker's 'A Night To Remember'

Everything about the 1997 film Titanic was epic from its $200,000,000.00 budget--the biggest budget for any film up to that time--to the unreasonable ambitions of its gangly 6 foot 2 director who came to the project with a legendary work-til-you-drop ethos that only longtime collaborators Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Paxton could understand and appreciate on a consistent basis. But when I heard the rumors of Director James Cameron following up his '94 action film True Lies with a movie about a boat whose history is well-known I was very disappointed because he'd been rumored since the 80s to make Spider-man. But then I recalled the level of integrity in all the films he'd done prior to 1997 and realized that if anybody could make an exciting film of a boat sinking in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, that man could only be James Cameron. And when I saw the movie when it came out on December 19, 1987, I was right.

James Cameron's 1997 disaster epic Titanic is based on the ship's ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage from Southhampton to New York but instead of the disaster itself, the film uses the disaster as a backdrop for steerage passenger and aspiring artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and 1st Class passenger Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) who become romantically involved to the chagrin of her groom-to-be, Cal (Billy Zane) and her mother, Ruth (Frances Fisher) who prearranges the marriage due to financial difficulties and the debts of her deceased husband. This relationship occupies the foreground for much of the film and used by the director to parallel the ship's sinking by acting as Jack and Rose's relationship and the opposition they faced from her society. 

On the film's documentary, Cameron is very open about the fact that he watched Roy Ward Baker's 1958 film A Night To Remember for inspiration, and if you've seen that film you see the strong pedigree between them as they are almost word-for-word the same exact film with the exception of the Jack and Rose story thread which was ingenious on the part of Cameron because their story--getting to follow these 2 characters whose relationship from the beginning (like the ship itself) is ill-fated--humanizes the wholesale and generic statistic of the 1,500 faceless and nameless people who lost their lives that night. Jack Dawson dies as the ship dies but the film itself will be around for generations to come. 

Everything about Titanic was miraculous and unprecedented. When I saw it on opening weekend I started counting down for it to come out on video tape which, at the time, was the dominant format. It was number 1 that 1st weekend and it usually takes a film about 2 months to fall out of the top 10; Titanic took around 52 weeks to fall to number 2! The movie was the 1st to cross the billion dollar threshold the equivalent of someone going from an amateur talent show to Michael Jackson in just 1 year. His 2009 film Avatar topped Titanic but it doesn't have the same magic of its predecessor in any way, shape, or form. I got this on blu ray not too long ago and the picture and sound quality are excellent as are the documentaries on the making of the film.