Titanic
Academy Award × 11·AFI #83·National Film Registry
101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story of her life aboard the Titanic, 84 years later. A young Rose boards the ship with her mother and fiancé. Meanwhile, Jack Dawson and Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets aboard the ship. Rose tells the whole story from Titanic's departure through to its death—on its first and last voyage—on April 15, 1912.
What critics thought
Cameron's technical achievement drew near-universal awe — the recreation of the sinking is genuinely staggering in scale and period detail — but the script and dialogue split critics sharply, with some finding the love story emotionally overwhelming and others finding it embarrassingly thin. The film became so dominant culturally that backlash set in almost immediately, and a gap opened between passionate audience devotion and a growing critical tendency to dismiss it as melodramatic kitsch, a gap that still hasn't fully closed.
“Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it.”
James Berardinelli·ReelViews
“What really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only is it not, it is not even close.”
Kenneth Turan·Los Angeles Times
“Cameron's script wouldn't have sustained Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh for 80 minutes, but, somehow, he and his magical cast revive that old-style studio gloss for three riveting hours. Titanic is a sumptuous assault on the emotions, with a final hour that fully captures the horror and the freezing, paralysing fear of the moment.”
Adrian Turner·Radio Times
“a lush and terrifying spectacle of romantic doom. Writer-director James Cameron has restaged the defining catastrophe of the early 20th century on a human scale of such purified yearning and dread that he touches the deepest levels of popular moviemaking.”
Owen Gleiberman·Entertainment Weekly
“The number of times in this unbelievably badly written script that the two [lead characters] refer to each other by name was an indication of just how dramatically the script lacked anything more interesting for the actors to say.”
San Francisco Examiner
Genres
Drama, Romance
Cast & Crew
DirectorJames Cameron
StarringLeonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher
ComposerJames Horner
Titanic
Academy Award × 11·AFI #83·National Film Registry
101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story of her life aboard the Titanic, 84 years later. A young Rose boards the ship with her mother and fiancé. Meanwhile, Jack Dawson and Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets aboard the ship. Rose tells the whole story from Titanic's departure through to its death—on its first and last voyage—on April 15, 1912.
What critics thought
Cameron's technical achievement drew near-universal awe — the recreation of the sinking is genuinely staggering in scale and period detail — but the script and dialogue split critics sharply, with some finding the love story emotionally overwhelming and others finding it embarrassingly thin. The film became so dominant culturally that backlash set in almost immediately, and a gap opened between passionate audience devotion and a growing critical tendency to dismiss it as melodramatic kitsch, a gap that still hasn't fully closed.
“Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it.”
James Berardinelli·ReelViews
“What really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only is it not, it is not even close.”
Kenneth Turan·Los Angeles Times
“Cameron's script wouldn't have sustained Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh for 80 minutes, but, somehow, he and his magical cast revive that old-style studio gloss for three riveting hours. Titanic is a sumptuous assault on the emotions, with a final hour that fully captures the horror and the freezing, paralysing fear of the moment.”
Adrian Turner·Radio Times
“a lush and terrifying spectacle of romantic doom. Writer-director James Cameron has restaged the defining catastrophe of the early 20th century on a human scale of such purified yearning and dread that he touches the deepest levels of popular moviemaking.”
Owen Gleiberman·Entertainment Weekly
“The number of times in this unbelievably badly written script that the two [lead characters] refer to each other by name was an indication of just how dramatically the script lacked anything more interesting for the actors to say.”
San Francisco Examiner
Genres
Drama, Romance
Cast & Crew
DirectorJames Cameron
StarringLeonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher
ComposerJames Horner