TITANIC (1997) [3D]
Rated: PG-13
My Grade: A+
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It's been 15 years since James Cameron's movie was released and set box-office records that wouldn't be matched -and surpassed- until 2009 by Cameron's own "Avatar."
For those unfamiliar with the movie: It begins in modern (well, 1996) times with a Russian science ship in the North Atlantic playing host to a group of ship-wreck explorers looking for a priceless diamond necklace believed to be located inside the wreck of the RMS Titanic. While the diamond is not found what is found is a drawing of a nude young woman wearing the necklace while posing for the artwork the day of the Titanic's sinking. By happenstance this discovery is reported on by a news outlet and that young woman, now 101, contacts the explorers, suggesting she might have information on where the diamond is.
Flown from Cedar Rapids to the North Atlantic Rose Dawson-Calvert tells the explorers the story of experiences on the Titanic's maiden, and only, voyage. In an arranged marriage for wealth orchestrated by her mother (then) Rose Dewitt-Bukater feels trapped in her life and contemplates suicide by jumping off the back of the ship when the first-class girl meets the third-class "steerage" passenger Jack Dawson.
What mostly follows for the first half of the 3-hour movie is showing the audience the life on board Titanic for both the rich first-class passengers and the poor third-class passengers especially as Jack fights for Rose's affections with her fiancee Cal Hartley (a Pittsburgh steel tycoon) while under the watchful eye of Rose's mother.
One can take or leave the love story that occupies the first part of the movie as what's going to happen is obvious (Cal, is a rich bastard whom Rose doesn't love and is only marrying for the financial convenience of her domineering mother) but I find it effective and touching as the young Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play well off one another.
At the half-way point of the movie the Titanic has her fateful encounter with an iceberg and the movie shifts from a pretty paint-by-the-number romance to a more intense action movie as events transpire more-or-less in real time providing the most accurate (at the time) depiction of the ship's sinking. Rose and Jack try and to out-run the encroaching water, pursuit by Cal and his valet/bodyguard and bring the audience into an experience with the ship's sinking. During the sequence, however, the best moments comes when we're not following the fictional Jack and Rose but experiencing events in the sinking that likely occurred in real life and those events that did occur according to survivor reports. The best pieces come in the musical set-pieces centered around the ship's band playing "Ne'er My God to Thee" followed by an action-music piece to the score track "A Building Panic" as we see the escalating drama on the ship once all of the lifeboats have left and 1500 people remain trapped on the doomed ship.
The movie has its faults, Cal (Billy Zane) is a mustache away from being a melodrama villain, the dialogue can be a bit odd sometimes and Leo's yelling "Wohoo" and various other yelps is up there with young Anakin's "Yipee!" in The Phantom Menace.
But, really, all of that form is covered up by just an enthralling movie with good performances by Leo, Kate Winslet and especially Gloria Stewart playing the centenarian Rose.
Titanic sank on the night/early morning of Apirl 14/15 1912, 100 years ago and it's a story that still manages to capture the emotions of people across the world. The movie's re-release is set to coincide with the centennial anniversary of the ship's completion, launch, and sinking (April 2, 10, 14 respectively) and while you can criticize Cameron or the studios for "cashing in", it is a monumental anniversary and the movie does play great respect to the sinking.
But then there's the 3D.
Obviously 3D's been the big thing for movies since "Avatar" took in over 2-Billion dollars a few years ago so since then practically every movie has been made in 7(or converted to) 3D due to the higher ticket prices and whether it makes sense to do it or not. I'm not sure here it makes sense to make the movie into 3D.
The biggest hurdle being that the movie wasn't filmed for 3D which involves two cameras side-by-side to act as the two human eyes of the viewer, this gives another view point in order to create the illusion of depth when both images are viewed at once through special glasses. To convert a movie into 3D requires a fairly complicated process to sort-of "fake" it and this can either be done well or poorly. Many of the movies released over the last 2-3 years that were not filmed for 3D but released in it did the conversion poorly.
From my point of view and opinion there are three types of 3D used in movies:
1. "Gimmicky 3D." This is mostly the type of 3D used in the middle of last century as a gimmick to get more people to the theaters but doesn't offer much in the way of "getting into the movie" or making the experience more immersive; more often than not it involves the gimmick of "sticking things into the camera" which to the viewer appears to jut out of the screen and into the real world. I'm not a fan for this type of 3D as it literally "breaks the fourth wall" and I'm just not impressed by the appearance of being able to 'reach out and touch" something that supposed to be "reaching out and touching" something that's inside the movie, and not something outside the movie.
2. "Colorforms 3D." Colorforms were a type of "toy" when I was growing up (and were around much before that) and involved a plastic cut-out of something that'd "stick" to a waxy cardboard background via static electricity or something. In "3D" this to me is where the "most forward" object looks like a flat plane (i.e. no real depth) stuck onto the "screen" which is the background. Usually converted movies have this look as it's pretty much what the very process is.
3. "Immersive 3D." The type of 3D that uses what the third dimension is. Depth. Where the movie screen becomes an actual window into the movie world. Nothing is coming out of it, nothing appears to be laying on a picture of a landscape, things feel like they're there and beyond the movie screen. This is the type of 3D Avatar (and to some degree Transformers 3) used and requires the use of actual, high-quality, 3D cameras.
The conversion process used for old movies pretty much precludes the latter "type" but I think Titanic finds a "happy median" between "Type 2" and "Type 3." They obviously can't create that third dimension since there was no camera there to capture the viewpoint of the other eye but whatever conversion process used does come close. (There are a couple of shots using CGI that does pull it off (since the other camera can be created in the computer), one shot in particular involves Jack laying on a bench looking up at the night sky.)
Shots look like a "layer" of 2D elements, sort of like laying colorforms ontop of one another. The "distance" between them seems faked to create an illusion of depth and this more-or-less works. There are a few times where it seems "distant" objects aren't "far away" enough and other times where it seems like things aren't quite laid out in three-dimensional space they "way they should be" but, mostly, I think the conversion process here was fairly well done. It wasn't strictly "color forms" with the most "front"/focus objects laid ontop of "everything else" but there are layers. In one shot, for example, we're looking over the shoulder of a character, and we can clearly see another character "beyond" the should who's listening to the conversation and "beyond" them we see the stuff going on in the back-ground even itself seems to have a "background."
CGI shots benefit from giving a sense of scale, size, height, and distance pretty well.
In the end?
Titanic for me is a masterful movie, it really deserves all of the accolades it got and any "hate" for it mostly, to me, seems like typical ex post facto "hate the popular thing" type of rhetoric. Sure, the movie isn't perfect and people are welcome not to like it, but for me at the very least the movie is nearly flawless from the moment Titanic hits the iceberg to when the stern falls below the ocean surface.
It was worth seeing for me on the big-screen again and I may, in fact, go again in the next week or so (not sure how long this is going to be in theaters) with my mother. Titanic is a movie I try and to watch once a year in April and this year was obviously no exception.
So if it's a movie you enjoy I'd say it's at the very least worth seeing on the big-screen again just because that's how movies should be seen, I just wish the gimmick of 3D hadn't been used as I'm sure -given the anniversary- it would have done fine if it was just a digital/remastered re-release without 3D.
