TITANIC

How Long Can You Tread Water?

Director Jim Cameron turns in another epic, from an unlikely source. There have been many films made about the sinking of the Titanic. Well, there doesn't have to be any more. I can't imagine what more could be done with it.

This is really two movies in one, which justifies the long running time and huge budget. The first movie is cribbed from Shakespeare, which becomes especially obvious through the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead, since he played Romeo just last year. DiCaprio is a good actor, but I've always found him irritating. A good script could have made me forgive his presence, especially since he CO-stars with Kate Winslet. However, the troubled romance plot presented in the first half of the film is the most horrendously unimaginative collection of worn out clichés ever assembled by professional screenwriters. I won't bore you with the details - besides, you've all seen them before.

Things begin promisingly with Bill Paxton playing a hi-tek treasure hunter searching the wreck for a missing jewel. The actual deep sea footage is breathtaking. Clues to the jewel's whereabouts lead to a survivors own story of the disaster. After that, there's about an hour of tedium detailing the above-mentioned shipboard romance between the two stars, while Billy Zane hams it up as Winslet's stuffy and villainous fiancee Hope you don't mind being bludgeoned with the simple (and simple-minded) message: money equals evil and poor people are virtuous. I kept praying for the damn iceberg to show. Among all the nonsense there's a lot of fascinating detail about the ship and why it sank.

Finally, the ship hits the iceberg (or sideswipes it rather - an important detail). Here the second movie begins - an incredible disaster epic with all the power of anything Cameron has put out. He's managed to use every possible bit of the entire recorded sequence of events to stage a continuous pageant of wonders and horrors. It really felt as if I was along for the ride every soggy, bone-chilling step of the way. There's also a real sense of isolation - the horror of knowing that most are beyond all hope of rescue. The magic wrought here is truly sensational.

I hope you find, as I did, that the great movie makes it worth sitting through the lousy one.

True life shockudrama; p-star Cameron; thrilling disaster footage; sea of floating corpses.

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