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Like a great iron Sphinx on the ocean floor, the Titanic faces still toward the West, interrupted forever on its only voyage. We see it in the opening shots of “Titanic,” encrusted with the silt of 85 years; a remote-controlled TV camera snakes its way inside, down corridors and through doorways, showing us staterooms built for millionaires and inherited by crustaceans.

These shots strike precisely the right note; the ship calls from its grave for its story to be told, and if the story is made of showbiz and hype, smoke and mirrors--well, so was the Titanic. She was “the largest moving work of man in all history,” a character boasts, neatly dismissing the Pyramids and the Great Wall. There is a shot of her, early in the film, sweeping majestically beneath the camera from bow to stern, nearly 900 feet long and “unsinkable,” it was claimed, until an iceberg made an irrefutable reply.

James Cameron's 194-minute, $200 million film of the tragic voyage is in the tradition of the great Hollywood epics. It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding. If its story stays well within the traditional formulas for such pictures, well, you don't choose the most expensive film ever made as your opportunity to reinvent the wheel.

We know before the movie begins that certain things must happen. We must see the Titanic sail and sink, and be convinced we are looking at a real ship. There must be a human story--probably a romance--involving a few of the passengers. There must be vignettes involving some of the rest and a subplot involving the arrogance and pride of the ship's builders--and perhaps also their courage and dignity. And there must be a reenactment of the ship's terrible death throes; it took two and a half hours to sink, so that everyone aboard had time to know what was happening, and to consider their actions.

All of those elements are present in Cameron's “Titanic,” weighted and balanced like ballast, so that the film always seems in proportion. The ship was made out of models (large and small), visual effects and computer animation. You know intellectually that you're not looking at a real ocean liner--but the illusion is convincing and seamless. The special effects don't call inappropriate attention to themselves but get the job done.

The human story involves an 17-year-old woman named Rose DeWitt Bukater ( Kate Winslet ) who is sailing to what she sees as her own personal doom: She has been forced by her penniless mother to become engaged to marry a rich, supercilious snob named Cal Hockley ( Billy Zane ), and so bitterly does she hate this prospect that she tries to kill herself by jumping from the ship. She is saved by Jack Dawson ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a brash kid from steerage, and of course they will fall in love during the brief time left to them.

The screenplay tells their story in a way that unobtrusively shows off the ship. Jack is invited to join Rose's party at dinner in the first class dining room, and later, fleeing from Cal's manservant, Lovejoy ( David Warner ), they find themselves first in the awesome engine room, with pistons as tall as churches, and then at a rousing Irish dance in the crowded steerage. (At one point Rose gives Lovejoy the finger; did young ladies do that in 1912?) Their exploration is intercut with scenes from the command deck, where the captain ( Bernard Hill ) consults with Andrews ( Victor Garber ), the ship's designer and Ismay ( Jonathan Hyde ), the White Star Line's managing director.

Ismay wants the ship to break the trans-Atlantic speed record. He is warned that icebergs may have floated into the hazardous northern crossing but is scornful of danger. The Titanic can easily break the speed record but is too massive to turn quickly at high speed; there is an agonizing sequence that almost seems to play in slow motion, as the ship strains and shudders to turn away from an iceberg in its path--and fails.

We understand exactly what is happening at that moment because of an ingenious story technique by Cameron, who frames and explains the entire voyage in a modern story. The opening shots of the real Titanic, we are told, are obtained during an expedition led by Brock Lovett ( Bill Paxton ), an undersea explorer. He seeks precious jewels but finds a nude drawing of a young girl. Meanwhile, an ancient woman sees the drawing on TV and recognizes herself. This is Rose (Gloria Stuart), still alive at 101. She visits Paxton and shares her memories (“I can still smell the fresh paint”). And he shows her video scenes from his explorations, including a computer simulation of the Titanic's last hours--which doubles as a briefing for the audience. By the time the ship sinks, we already know what is happening and why, and the story can focus on the characters while we effortlessly follow the stages of the Titanic's sinking.

Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well. The technical difficulties are so daunting that it's a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion. I found myself convinced by both the story and the saga. The setup of the love story is fairly routine, but the payoff--how everyone behaves as the ship is sinking--is wonderfully written, as passengers are forced to make impossible choices. Even the villain, played by Zane, reveals a human element at a crucial moment (despite everything, damn it all, he does love the girl).

The image from the Titanic that has haunted me, ever since I first read the story of the great ship, involves the moments right after it sank. The night sea was quiet enough so that cries for help carried easily across the water to the lifeboats, which drew prudently away. Still dressed up in the latest fashions, hundreds froze and drowned. What an extraordinary position to find yourself in after spending all that money for a ticket on an unsinkable ship.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Titanic (1997)

Rated PG-13 For Shipwreck Scenes, Mild Language and Sexuality

194 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson

Kate Winslet as Rose Dewitt Bukater

Billy Zane as Cal Hockley

Kathy Bates as Molly Brown

Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett

Written and Directed by

• James Cameron

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‘titanic’: thr’s 1997 review.

On Dec. 19, 1997, James Cameron's epic set sail in theaters nationwide.

By Duane Bygre

Duane Bygre

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On Dec. 19, 1997, James Cameron’s Titanic set sail in theaters nationwide. The 193-minute blockbuster epic went on to dominate the 70th Academy Awards, nabbing 11 wins including best picture. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.

Paramount should replace that white mountain in its logo with an iceberg for the next several months. The studio will navigate spectacularly with its latest launch, Titanic , the most expensive movie ever created about what was once the largest moving object ever built.

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'deadwood': thr's 2004 review, 'family guy': thr's 1999 review.

A daunting blend of state-of-the-art special effects melded around a sterling central story, Titanic plumbs personal and philosophical story depths not usually found in “event-scale” movies that, beneath their girth and pyrotechnics, often have nothing at their core.

Titanic , however, is no soulless junket into techno-glop wizardry but rather a complex and radiant tale that essays both mankind’s destructive arrogance and its noble endurance. 

Ultimately, we all know the horrible outcome of the Titanic sinking. We can recite the numbers lost and the awesome dimensions of the ship, and we can construct some sort of comparative scope for the catastrophe. But all these are mere quantifications and chit-chat regurgitation. 

Cameron, who wrote and directed the film, has put a face on that horrific happening; he has taken us beyond the forensics of the sinking and put us inside the skin and psyches of those who perished and those who survived. In both, we see facets of ourselves: In philosophical microcosm, Cameron shows that in the end — both the good and the bad endings — we’re all in the same boat.

Told in flashback as a single-minded fortune hunter (Bill Paxton) combs the Titanic’s wreckage with his state-of-the-art search ship in hopes of finding undiscovered treasure, the story is recalled by a 103-year-old woman (Gloria Stuart) who was a passenger on the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage. Drifting back to that time in April 1912, we see the trip through Rose’s (Kate Winslet ) 17-year-old eyes. 

High-spirited and betrothed to a monied mill heir (Billy Zane), Rose is, nevertheless, despondent. Like a Henry James heroine, she finds that she is not suited for life in the gilded cage that society is shaping for her as the baubled wife of a leisured industrialist. She foresees her life as being measured out by serving spoons, and she wants no part of such a stuffy existence. Her ennui turns to deep depression, and she nearly ends it by diving into icy waters, where she is saved only by the wise grace of a third-class passenger, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio ), whose joy for life and eagerness for living it to the fullest soon revitalize the young Rose. 

All the while, Cameron plants calamitous forebodings — the inadequacies of the life rafts, equipment shortages and the vanity of the ship’s creators and captain. Narratively, Titanic is a masterwork of big-canvas storytelling, broad enough to entrance and entertain yet precise and delicate enough to educate and illuminate. Undeniably, one could nitpick — critic-types may snicker at some ‘ 60s-era lines and easy-pop ‘ 90s-vantage hindsights  — but that’s like dismissing a Mercedes on the grounds that its glove compartment interior is drab. 

Unlike in most monstrosities of this film’s size and girth, the characters are not assembled from a standard stock pot. Within the dimensions of such an undertaking, Cameron, along with his well-chosen cast, has created memorable, idiosyncratic and believable characters. Our sympathies are warmed by the two leads: Winslet is effervescently rambunctious as the trapped Rose, while DiCaprio’s willowy steadfastness wonderfully heroic. On the stuffy side of the deck, Zane is aptly snide as Rose’s cowardly fiance, while Frances Fisher is perfect as a social snob, both shrill and frightened. Kathy Bates is a hoot as the big-hatted, big-mouthed Molly Brown — she is, indeed, indestructible. On the seamier side, David Warner is positively chilling as a ruthless valet. As the deep-sea treasure hunter, Paxton brings a Cameron-type obsessiveness to his quest. 

Also on the Oscar front, clear the deck for multiple technical nominations. Front and center is, of course, Cameron. A decided cut above other superstar directors in that he can also write, Cameron deserves a director’s nomination for his masterful creation — it’s both a logistical and aesthetic marvel. The film’s fluid, masterfully punctuated editing, including some elegantly economical match cuts, is outstanding: Editors Conrad Buff and Richard A. Harris deserve nominations, as does cinematographer Russell Carpenter for his brilliantly lit scopings ; his range of blues seems to hit every human emotion. 

Titanic ‘s visual and special effects transcend state-of-the-art workmanship, invoking feelings within us not usually called up by razzle-dazzlery . Highest honors to visual effects supervisor Rob Legato and special effects coordinator Thomas L. Fisher for the powerful, knockdown imagery. It’s often awesome, most prominently in showing the ship’s unfathomable rupture. The splitting of the iron monster is a heart stopper, in no small measure compounded by the sound team’s creaking thunders. Through it all, James Horner’s resonant and lilting musical score, at times uplifted by a mournful Irish reed, is a deep treasure by itself.  — Duane Byrge , originally published on Nov. 3, 1997.

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Titanic (United States, 1997)

Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. 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 -- from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie.

In each of his previous outings, Cameron has pushed the special effects envelope. In Aliens , he cloned H.R. Giger's creation dozens of times, fashioning an army of nightmarish monsters. In The Abyss , he took us deep under the sea to greet a band of benevolent space travelers. In T2 , he introduced the morphing terminator (perfecting an effects process that was pioneered in The Abyss ). And in True Lies , he used digital technology to choreograph an in-air battle. Now, in Titanic , Cameron's flawless re-creation of the legendary ship has blurred the line between reality and illusion to such a degree that we can't be sure what's real and what isn't. To make this movie, it's as if Cameron built an all-new Titanic , let it sail, then sunk it.

Of course, special effects alone don't make for a successful film, and Titanic would have been nothing more than an expensive piece of eye candy without a gripping story featuring interesting characters. In his previous outings, Cameron has always placed people above the technological marvels that surround them. Unlike film makers such as Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, Cameron has used visual effects to serve his plot, not the other way around. That hasn't changed with Titanic . The picture's spectacle is the ship's sinking, but its core is the affair between a pair of mismatched, star-crossed lovers.

Titanic is a romance, an adventure, and a thriller all rolled into one. It contains moments of exuberance, humor, pathos, and tragedy. In their own way, the characters are all larger-than- life, but they're human enough (with all of the attendant frailties) to capture our sympathy. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Titanic is that, even though Cameron carefully recreates the death of the ship in all of its terrible grandeur, the event never eclipses the protagonists. To the end, we never cease caring about Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Titanic sank during the early morning hours of April 15, 1912 in the North Atlantic, killing 1500 of the 2200 on board. The movie does not begin in 1912, however -- instead, it opens in modern times, with a salvage expedition intent on recovering some of the ship's long-buried treasure. The expedition is led by Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), a fortune hunter who is searching for the mythical "Heart of the Ocean", a majestic 56 karat diamond which reputedly went down with the ship. After seeing a TV report about the salvage mission, a 101-year old woman (Gloria Stuart) contacts Brock with information regarding the jewel. She identifies herself as Rose DeWitt Bukater, a survivor of the tragedy. Brock has her flown out to his ship. Once there, she tells him her version of the story of Titanic 's ill-fated voyage.

The bulk of the film -- well over 80% of its running time -- is spent in flashbacks. We pick up the story on the day that Titanic leaves Southampton, with jubilant crowds cheering as it glides away from land. On board are the movie's three main characters: Rose, a young American debutante trapped in a loveless engagement because her mother is facing financial ruin; Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), her rich-but-cold-hearted fiancé; and Jack Dawson, a penniless artist who won his third-class ticket in a poker game. When Jack first sees Rose, it's from afar, but circumstances offer him the opportunity to become much closer to her. As the voyage continues, Jack and Rose grow more intimate, and she tries to summon up the courage to defy her mother (Frances Fisher) and break off her engagement. But, even with the aid of an outspoken rich women named Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), the barrier of class looms as a seemingly-insurmountable obstacle. Then, when circumstances in the Rose/Cal/Jack triangle are coming to a head, Titanic strikes an iceberg and the "unsinkable" ship (that term is a testament to man's hubris) begins to go down.

By keeping the focus firmly on Rose and Jack, Cameron avoids one frequent failing of epic disaster movies: too many characters in too many stories. When a film tries to chronicle the lives and struggles of a dozen or more individuals, it reduces them all to cardboard cut-outs. In Titanic , Rose and Jack are at the fore from beginning to end, and the supporting characters are just that -- supporting. The two protagonists (as well as Cal) are accorded enough screen time for Cameron to develop multifaceted personalities.

As important as the characters are, however, it's impossible to deny the power of the visual effects. Especially during the final hour, as Titanic undergoes its death throes, the film functions not only as a rousing adventure with harrowing escapes, but as a testimony to the power of computers to simulate reality in the modern motion picture. The scenes of Titanic going under are some of the most awe-inspiring in any recent film. This is the kind of movie that it's necessary to see more than once just to appreciate the level of detail.

One of the most unique aspects of Titanic is its use of genuine documentary images to set the stage for the flashback story. Not satisfied with the reels of currently-existing footage of the sunken ship, Cameron took a crew to the site of the wreck to do his own filming. As a result, some of the underwater shots in the framing sequences are of the actual liner lying on the ocean floor. Their importance and impact should not be underestimated, since they further heighten the production's sense of verisimilitude.

For the leading romantic roles of Jack and Rose, Cameron has chosen two of today's finest young actors. Leonardo DiCaprio ( Romeo + Juliet ), who has rarely done better work, has shed his cocky image. Instead, he's likable and energetic in this part -- two characteristics vital to establishing Jack as a hero. Meanwhile, Kate Winslet, whose impressive resume includes Sense and Sensibility, Hamlet , and Jude , dons a flawless American accent along with her 1912 garb, and essays an appealing, vulnerable Rose. Billy Zane comes across as the perfect villain -- callous, arrogant, yet displaying true affection for his prized fiancé. The supporting cast, which includes Kathy Bates, Bill Paxton, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill (as Titanic 's captain), and David Warner (as Cal's no-nonsense manservant), is flawless.

While Titanic is easily the most subdued and dramatic of Cameron's films, fans of more frantic pictures like Aliens and The Abyss will not be disappointed. Titanic has all of the thrills and intensity that movie-goers have come to expect from the director. A dazzling mix of style and substance, of the sublime and the spectacular, Titanic represents Cameron's most accomplished work to date. It's important not to let the running time hold you back -- these three-plus hour pass very quickly. Although this telling of the Titanic story is far from the first, it is the most memorable, and is deserving of Oscar nominations not only in the technical categories, but in the more substantive ones of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Great movie, but too intense, racy for younger kids.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A person's worth is far greater than the station t

Jack and Rose transcend societal expectations and

Minimal racial diversity. Central female character

Rose is briefly struck by Cal. Violence and intens

One scene of a topless woman as she poses for a pa

The most commonly used swear is "s--t," repeated s

First-class passengers drink wine and champagne wi

Parents need to know that James Cameron's King-of-the-World saga Titanic is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time and is still sure to attract young teen and tween audiences. There's brief nudity (a topless Rose poses for a nude drawing, which is also shown throughout the film) and sexuality (Jack…

Positive Messages

A person's worth is far greater than the station they were born into. Themes include compassion and humility.

Positive Role Models

Jack and Rose transcend societal expectations and fall in love with each other, acting bravely to help save themselves and others. The "haves" for the most part -- excepting Molly Brown, the captain, and the ship architect -- aren't the most admirable lot. Many people onboard act selfishly, like Cal, who pretends a small child is his to get a spot on a lifeboat, or the man who refuses to allow his half-filled lifeboat to return to save more people.

Diverse Representations

Minimal racial diversity. Central female characters like Rose and Molly Brown are portrayed as strong, nuanced, and in charge of their own destiny, despite pressures around them to act otherwise. Early 20th century class conflicts are a central theme: Privileges of the wealthy are highlighted and criticized, ending with Rose choosing to be identified as a third-class passenger.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Rose is briefly struck by Cal. Violence and intense peril are concentrated toward the end of the movie, especially as the ship begins to sink: Mass chaos leads to fistfights, pushing, gun violence, even suicide. People plunge to their death in icy waters, some killed by falling debris from the ship. Almost everyone left in the water drowns. Close-ups of passengers who stay on the ship, preferring to await the inevitable in their rooms or lounges.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

One scene of a topless woman as she poses for a painting, plus shots of that painting, as well as a few other nude drawings. Jack and Rose flirt, kiss passionately, eventually have sex. The love scene doesn't include any nudity, but the couple is sweaty, out-of-breath, bare-shouldered, on top of each other.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

The most commonly used swear is "s--t," repeated several times throughout. Other strong language includes one "f--k," "horses--t," "son of a bitch," "damn," "hell," "ass," "bloody," and several "goddamns," "oh my Gods," and other exclamations, especially toward the end. Insults include "slut," "whore," and "moron."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

First-class passengers drink wine and champagne with dinner. Men smoke cigars and drink brandy after dinner. Steerage passengers get drunk at a late-night party where beer is plentiful. Jack smokes cigarettes. Rose starts to smoke a cigarette, but her fiancé and mom stop her; she smokes one later after binge-drinking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that James Cameron 's King-of-the-World saga Titanic is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time and is still sure to attract young teen and tween audiences. There's brief nudity (a topless Rose poses for a nude drawing, which is also shown throughout the film) and sexuality (Jack and Rose make love in the backseat of a car), but the forbidden romance between the main characters (played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio ) is otherwise rather chaste by today's standards. It's the epic Titanic sinking scene that may make this movie too intense for younger kids. Throughout the mass chaos, people fight to save themselves ahead of others, plunge to watery deaths, and, in some cases, even die by suicide. Three incidents of gun violence take place during the sinking, with visuals of blood and depiction of suicide with a gun. On the flip side, characters display compassion and humility. The fact that this movie is based on a historical event may be too intense for sensitive children, but mature kids fascinated with the Titanic will find it compelling to watch. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 132 parent reviews

Not prepared for multiple references to suicide

Great movie and excellent source for discussions, what's the story.

Director James Cameron frames the story of the TITANIC in the late 1990s, when a high-tech underwater mission uncovers hidden treasures from the legendary ship, including a nude drawing of a beautiful girl. A 101-year-old woman (Gloria Stuart) reveals that she's the woman in the drawing, and viewers are then immersed in the events on board the ship from her point of view. She was Rose ( Kate Winslet ), a lovely young woman reluctantly engaged to one of the richest men on the ship, the cool and calculating Cal ( Billy Zane ). Unhappy with her engagement, Rose briefly considers launching herself overboard but is saved by the witty, handsome Jack ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a third-class passenger who won his Titanic ticket in a poker game. As Jack and Rose grow closer, Cal's jealousy swells, and he eventually frames Jack for stealing. When the ship hits an iceberg, everyone is thrown into a catastrophic, life-and-death situation where wealth and privilege are thrown out the window, relationships are tested, and courage is rare.

Is It Any Good?

One of the highest-grossing movies of all time, this enthralling saga achieved commercial and critical success, winning 11 Oscars out of its 14 nominations. The irresistible love story of Titanic stars two of the best actors of their generation; dazzling visual effects involve the most famous ship disaster of all time; a smug, rich villain is so easy to hate that he should be sporting an evil, twirling mustache; James Horner's score soars, coupled with Celine Dion's hokey-but-touching "My Heart Will Go On" theme; and there are fine performances by supporting actors like Kathy Bates as the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown, Frances Fisher as Rose's snobby mother, Bernard Hill (known best as King Theoden in that other epic, Lord of the Rings ) as Captain Smith, Victor Garber as the Titanic architect, and, of course, Oscar-nominated Stuart as the narrator, Old Rose.

Strong central female characters are the heart of Titanic , along with a look into the differences between social classes. Fans of romance will adore the journey of the star-crossed lovers, while action fans will appreciate the suspense and tension as the ship begins to sink. This is truly a film that has something for nearly everyone.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how in the face of catastrophe, people's true characters were revealed by their choices. How do different people on board the Titanic react to the ship sinking? Who were the bravest? Who were the most selfish?

Has society's emphasis on class changed since the time period depicted in Titanic ? What are other social considerations that divide people nowadays? How does Rose's life after the Titanic pay tribute to her brief love affair with Jack?

James Cameron is known for depicting strong, fearless female characters. If you're familiar with his other movies, compare Rose to Ripley ( Aliens ), Sarah Connor ( The Terminator ), and Neytiri, Trudy, and Grace ( Avatar ).

How do the characters in Titanic demonstrate compassion and humility ? Why are these important character strengths ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 19, 1997
• On DVD or streaming : September 10, 2012
• Cast : Billy Zane , Kate Winslet , Leonardo DiCaprio
• Director : James Cameron
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : History
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Humility
• Run time : 194 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language
• Last updated : February 13, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Letter of Recommendation

‘Titanic’ Is My Favorite Movie. There, I Said It.

A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; this is mine.

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By Jessie Heyman

A year ago, I went on a date, and the guy asked me what my favorite movie was. A simple question, but I stammered. His brow furrowed. “Didn’t your profile say that you love movie quotes?”

I didn’t want to reveal the truth — not so soon, at least — so I hid behind the Criterion Collection (“ ‘La Strada,’ ‘Rebecca,’ etc.”). Then a scene flashed in my head — a swell of music, an enormous hat: “You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic!”

A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; my secret is that I love “Titanic.” This has been true since I was a 10-year-old in a darkened theater, weeping uncontrollably on my mother’s lap. Like the children onscreen waving farewell to the doomed steamer, I marveled at the grandeur of what was passing before my eyes: a sweeping history lesson and a devastating romance between a first-class passenger named Rose (Kate Winslet) and a below-decks dreamboat named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). Until then, my cultural diet had consisted of Rodgers and Hammerstein singalongs and the Disney canon. “Titanic” — rapturous, tragic, real — was an awakening. In just over three hours, the film colored all my notions of grown-up life: love, loss, the female struggle, the unbreakable bond of a string quartet.

To my child’s mind, “Titanic” was impossibly vast: It felt as though the movie encompassed the entire mysterious range of human life. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10. I couldn’t fully understand this feeling of transcendence, so I just kept rewatching. I saw the movie three times when it was released in 1997. The following year, when it came out on VHS — a fat brick of a box set, neatly split into two acts of happy and sad — I routinely popped in the pre-iceberg tape to enjoy with my after-school snack. I began fixating on unlikely features of the film, delighting in its ancillary characters’ banal dialogue: the clueless graybeards (“Freud? Who is he? Is he a passenger?”); the poetry of the bridge (“Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch. Let’s stretch her legs”); the snobbery of Rose’s mother (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they’re not too crowded”).

As I matured, I stopped my regular viewings, but the movie continued playing in my mind. I was a melancholy indoor girl myself, and Rose perfectly articulated my teenage ennui: “the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter.” Even in the face of more complex ideas and challenges — like the travails of gender politics or problems of class — I found myself leaning on its casual wisdom and glossy sentimentality. The film’s unsubtle gender commentary began to feel revolutionary. (“Of course it’s unfair,” the chilly matriarch says while tightening the strings of her daughter’s corset. “We’re women.”) In the late ’90s, everyone I knew adored “Titanic,” but I felt in my heart that my own love affair with it was something special.

It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10.

Two decades’ worth of late-night jokes and revisionist hot takes, however, have coated my feelings of affection in deep shame. (Just last month, “the iceberg that sank the Titanic” appeared in a bit on “Saturday Night Live,” lamenting, “Why are people still talking about this?”) The older I grew, the more my enduring admiration felt like some sort of clerical error in my development, a box I had accidentally checked on my application to adulthood. I told myself it was just a guilty pleasure. How could it be anything else? Saying “Titanic” is my favorite movie would be like saying my favorite painting is the “Mona Lisa”: It suggests a lack of discernment.

But for me, the movie’s broadness is kind of the point. What snarky critics don’t appreciate is that the movie is a meme because it is a masterpiece. The film has become a cultural shorthand, a way of talking about ideas that are bigger than ourselves — mythic themes of hubris, love and tragedy — while also making a joke. (Has any line captured our collective quarantine mood more than that old chestnut, “It’s been 84 years ...”?) It also won 11 Oscars.

This past January, I decided, for the first time in a decade, to watch the movie from start to finish. When I was young — in my Tape 1 years — I was dazzled by the film’s spectacle. And yes, watching again, I fell for it in all the old ways: Jack’s good looks, Rose’s Edwardian walking suit, the allure of a real party. But as the camera panned over the sleeping elderly Rose, I broke into sobs seeing the pictures of her post-Titanic life — riding horses on the beach, climbing onto a flying machine dressed in Amelia Earheart cosplay, posing in an on-set glamour shot.

After a year of great loss, the pathos of that moment hit me differently. Never mind her heart — her life went on. She survived a disaster and ended up living a life so full that the experience became just a memory. It was the message in a bottle I needed, one of many that “Titanic” has sent my way over the years. I imagine I’ll be receiving these messages forever — even as an old lady, warm in her bed.

Jessie Heyman is executive editor of Vogue.com.

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A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic. A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic. A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.

• James Cameron
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Kate Winslet
• 3.3K User reviews
• 236 Critic reviews
• 75 Metascore
• 126 wins & 83 nominations total

• Jack Dawson

• Rose Dewitt Bukater

• Cal Hockley

• Molly Brown

• Ruth Dewitt Bukater

• Brock Lovett

• Captain Smith

• Spicer Lovejoy

• Thomas Andrews

• Bruce Ismay

• Lizzy Calvert
• Lewis Bodine
• Bobby Buell
• Anatoly Milkailavich
• (as Dr. Anatoly M. Sagalevitch)

• 1st Officer Murdoch
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia (at around 2h 30 mins) The elderly couple seen hugging on the bed while water floods their room were the owners of Macy's department store in New York, Rosalie Ida Straus and Isidor Straus , both of whom died on the Titanic. Ida was offered a seat on a lifeboat but refused so that she could stay with her husband, saying, "As we have lived together, so we shall die together." There was a scene filmed that depicted this moment but was cut from the final version. It was Mrs Straus who originally said "Where you go, I go" that inspired Rose's same line in the film.
• Goofs (at around 34 mins) Rose mentions Sigmund Freud 's ideas on the male preoccupation with size to Bruce. Freud did not publish the work relating to this until 1920 in "The Pleasure Principle." Also, up until 1919, Freud relied solely on data from females.

Jack : [to Ruth and other guests dining at their table] Well, yes, ma'am, I do... I mean, I got everything I need right here with me. I got air in my lungs, a few blank sheets of paper. I mean, I love waking up in the morning not knowing what's gonna happen or, who I'm gonna meet, where I'm gonna wind up. Just the other night I was sleeping under a bridge and now here I am on the grandest ship in the world having champagne with you fine people. I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you... to make each day count.

Molly Brown : Well said, Jack.

• Crazy credits In the final credits, the name of musician Ian Underwood is incorrectly reported as Ian Underworld.
• Alternate versions When aired on TNT, the scene where Jack is drawing Rose is a different take. The board that he uses to write on is higher to cover up any of her nude body.
• Connections Edited into Natural World: The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic (2006)
• Soundtracks My Heart Will Go On Music by James Horner Lyrics by Will Jennings Performed by Céline Dion Produced by James Horner and Simon Franglen Celine Dion performs courtesy of 550 Music/Sony Music Entertainment (Canada) Inc.

User reviews 3.3K

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• Jul 31, 2020

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• How long is Titanic? Powered by Alexa
• Did Titanic sink on April 14th or 15th?
• Was the wreck in the movie the real Titanic?
• What's a nickelodeon?
• December 19, 1997 (United States)
• United States
• Titanic wreck, Titanic Canyon, North Atlantic, Atlantic Ocean (location)
• Twentieth Century Fox
• Paramount Pictures
• Lightstorm Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $200,000,000 (estimated)
• $674,292,608
• $28,638,131
• Dec 21, 1997
• $2,264,750,694

Technical specs

• Runtime 3 hours 14 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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The Shipping News

By Anthony Lane

After all the hullabaloo, James Cameron’s “Titanic” will finally set sail on December 19th. Already, however, the film has moved away from the quayside, with a première in Tokyo and a public screening in London. The latter was attended by the Prince of Wales, and if any of us wondered whether His Royal Highness was well advised to lend his gracious presence to the tragedy of a sinking ship we were too polite to say. It was altogether a polite occasion; there is always something absurd about going to the movies in a tuxedo, even more so when the movie in question wastes no opportunity to laugh at stuffed shirts. If he really wanted to show solidarity with “Titanic,” Prince Charles should have rolled up in corduroy and old boots.

The hero of the tale is Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a freewheeling scruff—a skinny kindred spirit, perhaps, of his namesake Jack London—who wins a couple of steerage tickets in a poker game. Armed with little more than a sketchbook and an insolent grin, he leaps aboard the Titanic as she is about to cast off from Southampton on her maiden—and, as it turns out, her funeral—voyage. Jack thus joins the hundreds of other happy fools who believe that they are heading for a nice time; among them are the nervy and elegant Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher), the suspiciously moneyed Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), and Smith (Bernard Hill), the captain of the ship. The only glum face on view is that of Ruth’s daughter Rose (Kate Winslet), a young first-class Philadelphian who has already foreseen her own demise—not in the form of a large lump of ice in the North Atlantic but, far more scarily, at the hands of her fiancé, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), the man with a heart of absolute zero. Unless something happens, she will marry him, live comfortably, and suffer the long, slow death of the soul. The something is Jack, of course, who rescues a despairing Rose as she stands at the stern, red silk shoes on the railing, and prepares to jump. He hauls her back, they fall in love, he draws her nude, they make out in the cargo hold, and then the ship, in a touching display of erotic sympathy, rears up on end and goes down.

You might ask how such a simple story can take almost three and a half hours to tell—and by what miracle, moreover, “Titanic” should feel like the least boring movie of the year. The answer to both questions lies in the assiduous grace with which Cameron has framed, decorated, and wrapped the love affair. The film has been hailed as a fresh departure for him—as a flight from the panting mayhem of his “Terminator” films—but both of those pictures were obsessed by the bending and shaping of time. It is only in retrospect, appropriately, that we can see how serious that obsession was, how swiftly it went beyond a technical trick, and how thoroughly it has crept into every cranny of “Titanic.” If you’ve heard nothing about the movie, it’s a shock to see it open in a modern-day setting, with a deep-sea expedition to the wreck of the ship. Like the spacemen who cut into Ripley’s lost craft in Cameron’s “Aliens,” a bunch of scientists descend to the gray ghost of the Titanic, send robots through the fish-filled rooms, and retrieve a safe. Back on the surface, they pry it open, expecting jewels; instead, they find a drawing of a naked girl. A lady of a hundred and one sees the image on TV and phones the explorers, “Oh yes,” she says calmly, “the woman in the picture is me.”

This is the aged but still blooming Rose (Gloria Stuart), a survivor in every sense—“Wasn’t I a dish?” she says, looking at the drawing. From here the story unfurls in flashback, as she recounts her distant experience. Cameron’s great achievement is to shrink that distance: as Rose peers into the video monitor that displays the wreck, you see her face reflected in the screen until past and present are no more than a breath apart. Even finer are those sequences where the Titanic is resurrected; rather than simply cut to the spring of 1912, Cameron sends his camera gliding along the decks and gangways of the encrusted vessel until, as if in fulfillment of a wish, she melts into life. This may be the most beautiful special effect ever seen; in its peculiar magic, at once decorous and delirious, it feels closer to the Cocteau of “Beauty and the Beast,” say, than to the tedious wizardry of recent blockbusters. Many moviegoers, and almost all critics, inveigh against special effects, but what rankles is the abuse of effects; Cameron has repeatedly shown that in the right hands they are as fertile and provocative as any other artistic resource. At best, indeed, they answer to our hopes and terrors of transfiguration: the metallic morphing of the T-1000 in “Terminator 2” offered the most succulent image of self-replenishing evil since “Dracula,” and, at the other extreme, the way in which sunshine imperceptibly breaks upon the drowned corpse of the Titanic, and in which passengers start to stroll again upon its gleaming decks, is as bracing a prospect of rebirth as you could hope to imagine.

No wonder Leonardo DiCaprio looks so chipper. His performance is indeed that of a youth who has been given a new lease, or even the freehold, on life. Some of Jack’s lines are straight out of the Hobo’s Handbook—“I’ve got ten bucks in my pocket, I’ve got nothing to offer you”—but he manages to conjure an age when both he and the twentieth century were still in their teens and it was not entirely fanciful to be fancy-free. There’s an extraordinary moment, near the end, when Jack and Rose cling once more to the stern where they first met; now, however, they are right at the summit of the ship, which is vertical and poised to plunge. As it begins to slide like a sword into the waves, Jack shouts “This is it!” and you realize that, even in the face of death—or especially there, when their hearts are on overload—these two are having fun. Kate Winslet is in her element, and that element is water; given her bright, bedraggled Rose and her Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet,” not to mention the bathtub scene in “Heavenly Creatures,” you could plausibly argue that Winslet is emerging, like a shell-borne Venus, as the Esther Williams de nos jours . Winslet’s talent, however, extends beyond her gills, and from the opening scene, when the camera curves down to seek out Rose’s proudly pale face beneath the brim of her hat, you catch the same air of principled unpredictability—more Jeanne Moreau than bathing beauty—that lit up Winslet’s fiery, cigarette-waving heroine in last year’s “Jude.” Isn’t she a dish?

It took guts, and a certain generosity, for Cameron to cast his two leads like this. The movie is blissfully free of the middle-aged A-list that you would expect from a project of this magnitude, not to mention the B-minus list that used to bedevil disaster flicks; I like both Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford, for instance, but imagine how ponderous and straightforward “Titanic” would have seemed under their influence. As for Shelley Winters, there would have been no need for the iceberg. The best performance in “Titanic” comes from Victor Garber, who plays Andrews, the Irish builder of the ship. It would have been easy to nudge the role toward hysteria as his beloved creation breaks up beneath him, but Andrews is never more civilized and kindly than when he is overseeing the progress of doom. “She is made of iron, and she will sink,” he says firmly. Garber offers a wonderful portrait of a man who is stricken, but not by panic; as the Titanic tilts and sinks, Andrews stands by a mantelpiece with a drink and adjusts the clock by the time on his fob watch. Not only is he a model of conduct to the other passengers; he corrects and refines the movie’s automatic satire. For much of the time, we are invited to scoff at the snobs as they bicker and dine, and to relax in the unbuttoned company of Jack and his ilk. At one postprandial point, the camera whirls around with Rose as she dances a Celtic reel belowdecks—a shot borrowed from “Whiskey Galore”—and then cuts hard to Cal and his cronies talking politics through a fug of cigar. Later, amid the chaos, Rose tells him that half the people on the boat are going to die. “Not the better half,” says Cal. Boo! Hiss!

I didn’t object to the presence of this stage villain—he could walk into a one-reel melodrama from 1912, no questions asked—because he reinforced the growing sense that “Titanic” is, for all its narrative dexterity and the formidable modernity of its methods, an old-fashioned picture. The most radical thing about it is the version of the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” which Rose appears to have bought in Paris, and is presumably lost forever, together with the fifteen hundred dead. In both its emotional thrust and its social judgment, “Titanic” pursues a clear and often obvious route. Like “The English Patient,” it could be described as a long historical romance, and yet it boasts none of the intricate byways that darkened Minghella’s movie. At the close of the century, Cameron is pushing at cinema much as D. W. Griffith did at the start—raising the stakes of the spectacular, outwitting the intellect, and heading straight for the guts. He piles on the astonishment as if he owed it to the nature of his medium; there are sights here that no other director would have the nerve to design and stage—an old couple embracing on their double bed while the water flows beneath it like Lethe, or the ice-whitened bodies of passengers bobbing in the endless darkness, as if on a battlefield of water.

Some viewers have confessed themselves disappointed by the computer-generated images of the Titanic; the daytime shots, in particular, are lightened by a strange haze, and there are times when this unrusting palace resembles not so much an actual ship as one of those splendid, stylized liners from travel posters of the nineteen-twenties. Yet even that, I found, was no shortcoming, for it drove home the Titanic as a dream—a fatal vision of efficient loveliness for those who sailed in her, and a kind of unreal, awesome trip for those of us watching her now. She went down, according to this movie, as a direct result of Rose and Jack, because the men in the crow’s nest were too busy spying on the smooching couple to notice what was looming ahead. So now you know: the Titanic was lost for love. James Cameron’s film is grand and wrenching rather than clever or subtle, and it floods your eyes; if you are going to spend two hundred million dollars on a movie, this is the way to do it. ♦

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James Cameron’s Titanic, shot with a poet’s eye and a tin ear for dialogue, represents the best and the worst of 1997. The film drags at three-plus hours; it cost somewhere between $200 million and $300 million, which is obscene and more than any movie has ever cost; and it is often shamelessly sappy in telling the fictional love story between Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a 17-year-old American girl traveling with her hot-tempered millionaire fiance, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and 20-year-old Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a struggling artist who wins his steerage ticket in a poker game.

No matter. Titanic is thrilling in ways that no other movie in 1997 dared to be. Cameron, as director, writer, producer and editor, sticks his neck out, way out, in combining his romantic fiction with a real-life tragedy. On April 15, 1912, five days after embarking on its maiden voyage, from England to New York, the unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg and went down off the coast of Newfoundland, leaving 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers dead. Cameron wants to astonish us with sights hitherto unseen and to fill us with pity and terror. Visually, he does both. From the moment the largest floating object ever built hits that iceberg, we are confronted with images that will leave jaws dropping in wonder that, yes, movies can do this. Cameron built a replica of the Titanic 90 percent to scale in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, and reproduced the original interiors down to the silverware, wallpaper and carpeting.

It’s the words, Cameron’s own, that fail him. For example: “I’d rather be his whore than your wife,” Rose tells Cal, who oils his way around the ship like a dastardly villain out of a silent movie. You half expect to see his lines printed on title cards. It doesn’t help, either, that Cameron divides the passengers so schematically into the listless rich and the lively poor, who are most often found below deck, dancing lustily or bonding with their children.

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Yet we are drawn in by DiCaprio and Winslet, who play the lovers with vibrancy and feeling. After a contrived meeting – Jack saves Rose from suicide – he borrows a tux intended for the son of Molly Brown (Kathy Bates is a bawdy delight in too brief a role) and charms Rose at the captain’s table with his philosophy about “making every day count.” Later, Rose boldly asks Jack to sketch her in the nude, wearing only a priceless blue diamond, a gift from Cal. In a Renault touring car tucked away in the ship’s storeroom, Jack trembles as he and Rose make love for the first time. When the iceberg hits, Jack has been falsely arrested for stealing the diamond, and Rose – rivaling the determination shown by Linda Hamilton in Cameron’s The Terminator – braves flood and fire to get him out of handcuffs. Cameron’s rep as just a hard-ass action director is belied by Titanic and a closer look at the tender relationships in such films as Aliens and The Abyss.

Titanic skimps on details about the ship’s crew, the shortage of lifeboats and the distress signals that went unheeded, to keep the audience emotionally invested in Jack and Rose. But despite Cameron’s claims that David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago is his model, Titanic is far more than a sweeping romantic epic.

The film opens and closes with present-day scenes of Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett, a treasure hunter who uses a submersible vehicle to dive two and a half miles beneath the Atlantic to shoot the rusted ruins of the Titanic. Cameron made that dive himself, using robo-cameras to shoot inside the ship. Those haunting shots of staterooms, fireplaces and chandeliers are in the film, and when Cameron dissolves from their ghostly visage to a vivid re-creation, the effect is breathtaking.

Brock Lovett, of course, is interested in more than aesthetics. He wants to find the blue diamond that Rose wore the night Jack drew her. To that end, he enlists the aid of Rose, now 102 and played, beautifully, by Gloria Stuart. Without giving away the film’s secrets, it’s fair to say that Cameron sees himself in Brock the profiteer and in Jack the artist, who knows you can’t be in it just for the money.

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For Cameron, Titanic is an attempt to raise pop entertainment to the level of art. The film is strongest when its images are most harsh: the great ship cracking in two, its stern standing nearly straight up with passengers clinging to its sides before plunging into the sea; Molly Brown failing to persuade the passengers in her lifeboat to risk their lives to save others; and that final moonless night, the sea teeming with life-jacketed passengers – faces blue and throats raw from screaming for help before hypothermia reduces them to silent, floating corpses.

Cameron, the ultimate technocrat and the owner of the company that created the great digital effects for Titanic, has made a historical film that speaks to right now about the dangers of blind faith in technology. In an early scene, Jack and Rose stand on the bow of the ship, stretching their arms out to sea, oblivious of the 47,000 tons of steel beneath them. They’re flying high on youthful optimism, unaware of the greed and arrogance that will bring the ship down. Cameron is aware. The sight of the sad ruin of the Titanic got to him. It’ll get to you, too.

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Titanic (1997) – A 25th Anniversary Review of the Epic Romance Movie

We're going back to Titanic. It's been 25 years, and we can still remember the magical experience of seeing it in theaters.

TITANIC  1997: 25TH ANNIVERSARY REVIEW

Twenty-five years ago, the beloved star-crossed romance and disaster film,  Titanic , premiered in wide release on December 19, 1997. And the world of movies was never the same! Love it or hate it, you’ve probably seen it – perhaps more than once…or twice…or…well, you get the picture!

Titanic  tells the story of Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a seventeen-year-old upper-class young woman who falls in love with Jack Dawson ( Leonardo Dicaprio ), a poor struggling artist. Unfortunately, they also fall in love on the Titanic – the doomed ship fated to sink.

Beyond that, the script weaves historical figures in and out with ease, creating the perfect historical fiction narrative.

What Makes  Titanic  Popular?

For many years,  Titanic  remained the number-one bestselling film of all time. Only for Director James Cameron to beat his own record with  Avatar . 

Today, even with the continual rise of ticket sales and unstoppable superhero films, it continues to  slay at #3 . Say what you will about his movies; James Cameron knows how to appeal to an audience. 

With  Titanic , the film’s epic, sweeping quality appealed to everybody, not just a niche crowd. Don’t care for the romance? Many watched the movie for the visual effects and the Titanic  disaster .

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However, it’s hard to pinpoint any one reason behind the film’s success. Instead, many ingredients of the historical drama led to the perfect recipe for success. James Cameron’s screenplay cleverly used old-fashioned storytelling techniques and familiar archetypes to quickly connect the audience to the story and characters with universal themes.

Beyond that, the star-crossed romance of the rich girl and poor boy – aka Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic – had universal appeal, not to mention the undeniable chemistry between Kate Winslet and Leonardo Dicaprio as Rose and Jack.

Plus, there were the groundbreaking visual effects, the beautiful costumes, the gorgeous, haunting musical score, and the original theme song, “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion. 

Sure, the song’s become overplayed, but if you objectively listen to it, the music is actually beautiful. On top of all that, the acting is top-notch, with characters you quickly love and root for. 

With the perfect blend of romance, humor, tragedy, and suspense,  Titanic  has you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

Titanic  1997 Review: The Epic Romance Movie Stands the Test of Time

So, 25 years later, does  Titanic  still work as a film?

It’s been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint.

Like older Rose looking back to the Titanic, I look back to the first time I saw the film. As a young girl filled with girlish dreams and idealism with a personality much like Rose, it was the perfect time to see the movie. 

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And I didn’t just see it once or twice. I saw it seven times in the theater! Something about the film appealed to my younger self.

And on a re-watch of the story all these years later, the movie still has that magic appeal so rarely found in movies today. From the story to the  epic romance  to the music, visuals, costumes, and more,  Titanic  doesn’t make a false step. 

Sure, not everyone loves this movie. But many of us do, as shown by its continuous success all these years later.

Overall, I can’t help but love  Titanic . Sure, there are a couple of cheesy scenes, and Leo calls out “Rose” a few more times than necessary, but who cares? James Cameron captured a sweeping, magical epic that tugs at the heartstrings. 

You laugh, cry, hold your breath in suspense, and start all over again. From award-worthy performances that turned the lead actors into bona fide movie stars to haunting visuals of the real Titanic, James Cameron’s passion project continues to soar. 

And overall, it’s a timeless, spellbinding tale that draws you in again and again.

Content Note:  PG-13 for sensuality, brief nudity, an implied lovemaking scene, some language, and a few intense sequences.

Where to Watch:  You can stream  Titanic  on Pluto TV. You can also rent/and or buy on Digital and DVD.

Did you love  Titanic ? How many times have you seen it in the theater? Do you have a favorite moment? Let me know in the comments.

Editorial Note:  This Titanic film review was first published as a Titanic 20th anniversary review in 2017 and has been updated for the 25th anniversary in 2022.

Photos: 20th Century Fox/Paramount Pictures

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Amber works as a writer and digital publisher full-time and fell in love with stories and imagination at an early age. She has a Humanities and Film Degree from BYU, co-created The Silver Petticoat Review, contributed as a writer to various magazines, and has an MS in Publishing from Pace University, where she received the Publishing Award of Excellence and wrote her thesis on transmedia, Jane Austen, and the romance genre. Her ultimate dreams are publishing books, writing and producing movies, traveling around the world, and forming a creative village of talented storytellers trying to change the world through art.

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2 thoughts on “Titanic (1997) – A 25th Anniversary Review of the Epic Romance Movie”

And here I thought no one could top my five visits to see Titanic. Ha ha! I haven’t seen it in several years but I did get to see Celine Dion sing that famous song this year in Vegas. It instantly brought back my memories of the film. It was just so epic and emotional. If you ever get the chance to visit the Titanic museum in Branson MO, it’s one of my very favorite museums. They have replicated in detail some of the film’s sets. Plus, it’s an interactive experience that makes the whole story more real.

Glad I’m not the only one who saw it numerous times! 🙂 I’m not sure how I convinced my mother to let me go over and over. Haha. Seeing Celine Dion must have been amazing! I’ve never been to that Titanic museum but it sounds interesting. I’ve been to a couple traveling museums that were fantastic. I also just went to the big Titanic museum in Belfast, Ireland where they built the ship. It was incredible. I’m actually quite interested in history which was also part of the appeal of the film for me. So, it was a fascinating experience.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Action/Adventure , Drama , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 19, 1997
• Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson; Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater; Billy Zane as Caledon 'Cal' Hockley; Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett; Gloria Stuart as Old Rose; Kathy Bates as Molly Brown

Home Release Date

• September 1, 1998
• James Cameron

Distributor

• Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

It’s a time of opportunity for Jack Dawson. A few nights ago he was sleeping under a bridge, and just look at him today! After a well-played portside card game, he ends up a passenger on a beautiful cruise liner, the ship of dreams, the Titanic. And he’s taking an ocean voyage back to America.

But even that serious stroke of luck doesn’t live up to what happens next: Out of the blue, he meets the girl of his dreams.

Who woulda believed it? She’s definitely out of his league. He’s a drift-about adventurer/part-time artist and she … well, she’s Rose DeWitt Bukater, a young beauty his pals would probably call highfalutin. But Jack just calls her … perfect .

Sure, she’s got a few problems—one of them being a smothering engagement to a wealthy, controlling snake named Cal Hockley. On the other hand, even though Jack would just as soon the snobby Hockley take a hike, he’s glad of him. ‘Cause the guy drove Rose right into his arms. Jack was at the right place at the right time and stopped Rose from doing something stupid. But that’s how fate works, right? Someone steps out on a ledge, and somebody else is there to help.

Opportunities arise.

And now, as he walks on the deck of this gorgeous ship—sun on his face, Rose on his arm—why, everything seems possible. When they land in America, they’ll run away together. Work their way around the world, owing nothin’ to nobody. This is the beginning of a whole new life for both of them. Can’t you feel it? Jack’s the king of the world!

(You did know that this movie is about the Titanic, right?)

Positive Elements

At the root of Jack and Rose’s relationship is the question of freedom. Rose is wealthy but so locked in to the future marriage that her mother and fiancé have devised that she feels completely without choice. The free-spirited Jack is penniless but has freedom and choice in spades. He continually tells Rose that she can have those things too—with or without him. Even in the most dire of times, when it looks like they both might perish, Jack spurs his love to fight for a life she can live richly. “You must promise me that you won’t give up. No matter what happens,” he tells her.

She doesn’t. In her old age, we see her appear to still be pining for Jack from across the years. But the camera also pans across her life that’s been captured in a series of photos, illustrating just how fully she’s enjoyed the years, her family and her children.

In the midst of the shipwreck disaster, Jack and Rose both put their lives on the line for each other and for those they come across in need. The film also takes the time to point to others on the ship who face their deadly circumstances with as much bravery and love as possible: A mother calms her children with stories of family and home. An elderly couple embrace and whisper words of love. Crewmen stay below decks aiding the stragglers, even as the waters rush in. And right up to the point of the final devastation, the ship’s string quartet plays comforting tunes and hymns to calm the frightened passengers.

Spiritual Elements

Passengers sing a hymn during an onboard service. The musicians play “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” A scared passenger is intoning “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death …” when Jack steps up behind him and snorts, “You wanna walk a little faster through that valley!?” A priest comforts passengers by reciting passages from Revelation. Long before, an overconfident man boasts that “God himself could not sink” the ship.

Elderly and frail, Rose passes away in her sleep, and we watch as her younger self walks up Titanic’s once again pristine grand staircase. She’s welcomed by Jack and all the other people who died.

Sexual Content

When Jack reveals to Rose that he’s a struggling artist, he shows her some of his sketches, including several female nudes that the camera studies closely. Then, as a sign of her rising independence, Rose requests that he sketch her in the same way. She walks out of her bedroom in a see-through black robe that shows her nakedness underneath. She then opens the robe, fully revealing her breasts and quite a lot of her midsection. As she reclines on a couch, posing for Jack, the camera returns repeatedly to a shot of her face and chest.

Rose’s reclining nude sketch subsequently becomes a central part of the story, and we see it several times. We also see a painting of Picasso’s that features abstractly rendered topless women.

Rose and Jack caress, kiss repeatedly and ultimately have sex in the backseat of a car in the ship’s cargo hold. Most of this interlude takes place offscreen; we see Rose place Jack’s hand on her clothed breast, saying, “Put your hands on me, Jack.” The camera returns to the panting and nearly naked couple afterwards.

Violent Content

Class distinctions are a big part of this film. So we’ll break the violence down into two classes: fisticuffs and full-on calamity.

Cal yells angrily at Rose, knocks their table over and grabs her roughly by the chin. He later viciously slaps her across the face. Cal’s valet punches Jack in the stomach. Men struggle for survival by pummeling one another. Rose punches a panicked crewman, bloodying his nose.

At about 100 minutes in, the Titanic hits the iceberg we all know is approaching. And for the next 80 minutes the disaster unfolds, breaks apart, gradually rises in intensity and then sinks below the icy waters. The terror is disturbingly realistic. Violent moments find panic-stricken passengers falling from great heights. They’re electrocuted, drowned or crushed by toppling smokestacks. A nervous armed guard attempting to control the crowd shoots a man, then kills himself.

When the ship’s stern is thrust high into the air, its weight causes the vessel to break in two—and crash down on the folks already flailing in the water below. Once both halves of the doomed ocean liner disappear below the surface, a lone lifeboat navigates the silent sea of dead, frozen bodies bobbing in the night tide.

Crude or Profane Language

“There’s no need for language, Mr. Huxley,” Rose’s mother tells her daughter’s fiancé. And though she’s absolutely correct, it seems the movie’s scriptwriters paid her no mind. Dialogue here contains an f-word, a dozen s-words and a handful each of “d‑‑n,” “h‑‑‑,” “a‑‑,” “b‑‑ch” and “b‑‑tard.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused more than 20 times. God’s is paired with “d‑‑n” at least 10. Regional profanities include the Irish/Scottish version of the American s-word and “a‑‑,” along with “b-gger,” “b-llocks” and “bloody.” Rose makes an obscene finger gesture.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The wealthy folks in first class are regularly seen smoking cigars and drinking champagne, wine or brandy. And when Jack steals Rose away to a steerage-class party, the partiers there are tossing back glasses of beer and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Jack and Rose share in all of the above.

A man drinks from a hip flask, and one beer drinker gets falling-down drunk. The well-known historical figure Molly Brown tells a story of her husband once coming home “drunk as a pig.”

Other Negative Elements

The big secret of Rose’s family heritage is that her father passed away leaving them nothing but debt. Rose’s mother uses that fact and several tons of guilt to try to force Rose into a loveless marriage that can save their family’s fortunes.

Cal accuses Jack of stealing a diamond necklace after having the jewelry planted in the young man’s pocket. When Rose reveals that half the people onboard are destined to die, Cal retorts, “Not the better half.” He calls Rose a “whore who runs to a gutter rat.” She spits back, “I’d rather be his whore than your wife!” Cal picks up a crying child and uses her as a way to claim an open spot on a lifeboat, even though the seats were intended for women and children only.

Jack and others gamble.

It cost the White Star Line $7.5 million to build the RMS Titanic. It cost Paramount Pictures $200 million to make a movie about it. It was a huge risk to launch a ship so big in 1912. It’s an even bigger risk to tell its story in 1997. Scores of books and movies had already come and gone before James Cameron latched onto the idea—the idea to tell a story that everyone who buys a ticket for or purchases a video of would already know what happens at the end. And I haven’t mentioned yet that the movie lasts 3 hours and 15 minutes. It took less time for the grim disaster to play out in real life.

But everything director James Cameron touches seems to turn to gold. And he made sure he packed his ship of dreams with quite a bit that’s worth watching. There are enormous and fantastically elaborate set pieces that lend a broad grandeur to the adventure. A Romeo-and-Juliet romance involves a brash scruff from steerage and an upper-crust beauty who longs to escape her gilded cage. You’ve got cowardice and arrogance, bravery and compassion. And he wraps everything up with one of the most spectacular, protracted disaster sequences every captured on film.

Those still considering whether or not to take this fated cinematic ocean journey—for the first time or the fifth —however, should also realize that there’s more to run into here than a single hull-slicing chunk of ice. Some of the death scenes are grisly. Some of the language is as icy blue as the frozen bodies floating in the water. And some of Rose’s clothing choices—or lack of clothing choices—go far beyond what you’d expect in this kind of film.

What do we learn, beyond fictionalized glimpses of the real history behind Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage? That the joys of freedom surpass those of wealth. And that selfless courage is a virtue almost beyond all others. But also that impulsiveness bests discretion. And that youthful love and desire should never be checked or shortchanged.

“This is crazy; it doesn’t make any sense,” Jack says in the midst of his impulsive sexual romp with Rose. She responds, “I know, that’s why I trust it.”

That kind of philosophy, grabbed onto like a life vest and lived out with the fervor we see modeled here, is guaranteed to hit a few icebergs of its own. Which is why Rose is wrong. We can’t— shouldn’t —completely trust it.

A 3-D UPDATE: Titanic was a huge film to begin with—both visually and at the box office. And the three-dimensional rendering (in April 2012, exactly 100 years after the actual ship sank) of the ship’s living grandeur and violent death heightens the sad story’s emotional impact even further. Whether it’s Jack and Rose standing on the bow, the ship’s mighty pistons plunging up and down or the broken hull slipping beneath the waves, watching Cameron’s cinematic take on the Titanic’s tragedy in 3-D detail reinforces the film’s already realistic feel.

Cameron says he felt little compulsion to reshoot any scenes for the big encore. He told Entertainment Weekly , “There is an impulse to want to revise it. But I think every film should represent the time when it was made—both the technology that was available and the state of mind of the filmmaker and the actors. I could have redone half the shots in the film and made them look better, but what’s the point? Everybody’s got to set their own ground rules for themselves.” He did, however, make one exception, though even the most eagle-eyed Titanic fans will be hard-pressed to spot it. Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson questioned the positioning of the stars in the night sky at the moment the ship sank, and he urged Cameron to correct them. Cameron responded, “‘All right, you son of a b‑‑ch, send me the right stars for the exact time, 4:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, and I’ll put it in the movie.’ So that’s the one shot that has been changed.”

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Titanic Is Still the Purest Expression of Who James Cameron Is

As you might have heard, James Cameron’s Titanic reopened in theaters this past weekend. It even made some more money . This is a 3-D rerelease of the Oscar-winning 1997 epic, and what sets it apart from the previous 3-D rerelease (back in 2017) is that this time the film has been retooled with fancy new variable-frame-rate and high-frame-rate technology — the same “motion grading” that was utilized in Avatar: The Way of Water and the Avatar rerelease last September.

So how is Titanic with the 3-D and the variable frame rates? I couldn’t tell you. Titanic is one of my all-time-favorite films, but I’d rather remember it the way it was — the way it was produced and the way it looked when it made $1.8 billion, won 11 Oscars, and [ cue the swelling strings ] captured the hearts of millions, including myself.

At the same time, I don’t begrudge Cameron’s nerdy noodling with his greatest picture because this constant need to innovate has proven to be one of his great strengths as a director. Some filmmakers fall in love with the limitless possibilities of technology after some initial successes and disappear down deep, dark career holes (Robert Zemeckis and Ang Lee come to mind), but Cameron seems uniquely able to fuse his visionary side with his artistic one. We might say that Titanic is the purest expression of this.

At the time it came out, the knock on the film was that it was one-half corny love story and one-half stunning disaster flick. (Peter Travers of Rolling Stone famously put it on both his top-ten and worst-ten lists.) Many critics dinged Cameron for the clunky dialogue and (what they felt were) unconvincing performances — but they usually praised the second half, in which the ship goes down. The division did seem stark: The first half of Titanic feels at times like it was written by a lovesick teenager, while the second half feels like it was conceived by a sadistic engineer designing an ornate torture device.

While I understand these criticisms, I’ve never shared them. Because the structure of Titanic is the point of Titanic : It’s all about the collision between the snarky, tough-guy, tech-head ethos and the soft, the vulnerable, the emotional. We can sense this in the film’s opening scenes as Bill Paxton’s undersea explorer, Brock Lovett, utters flowery narration while holding a video camera up to a monitor display of the Titanic wreck. “It still gets me every time,” Lovett intones as Paxton’s resonant, grown-up-surfer-boy voice makes us wonder if he’s being remotely sincere, “to see the sad ruin of the great ship sitting here, where she landed at 2:30 in the morning, April 15, 1912, after her long fall from the world above.” Then his assistant breaks the spell, chuckling: “You’re so full of shit, boss,” he says, and the two men crack up.

Paxton’s character isn’t discussed much when it comes to Titanic , but he’s clearly a stand-in for Cameron himself, the cynical, high-tech treasure hunter who is about to have his heart broken by the story of an old shipwreck. We see the flip side of this just a couple of scenes later, when Cameron cuts away from the cool, steely hues of the salvage ship to find the aged Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart) in her cluttered, warmly lit, flower-filled home, where she’s working a potter’s wheel when she sees the TV report of Lovett revealing the discovery of a sketch of the young Rose. Here, then, are the two extremes of the picture, presented in pointed visual contrast, almost as if two completely different films have begun to bleed into each other.

This duality within Cameron of the hard-ass and the softy — which I already wrote about a couple of times last year — had always been evident in his work, but it really wasn’t until Titanic that the two sides seemed to take equal hold. In the director’s earlier films, the emotional and personal is often a powerful grace note beneath the action — whether it’s Ripley’s maternal instincts for Newt kicking in during Aliens (1985) or the sentimental turn the relationship between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Edward Furlong’s John Connor takes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Cameron did try to alter the mix in The Abyss (1989), which is a tough-as-nails action-thriller that transforms in its final act into an earnest tale of marital reconciliation (and then dorky, wide-eyed, underwater alien wonderment, but that’s a different story). The Abyss is an imperfect masterpiece, but the way that picture uses the tale of an estranged husband and wife’s renewed love for each other to undercut its own macho theatrics holds the seeds of Titanic , a movie that embodies the rift in Cameron’s soul as well as its reconciliation.

The director returns to this clash of sensibilities over and over again in Titanic . Hearing Rose’s story, Lovett and his men respond like engineers, obsessed with the mechanics of what’s happening. (“He figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big with too small a rudder. It can’t corner worth shit!”) Rose, meanwhile, focuses not on what objects do but what they evoke — the way she might look in a hand mirror she last handled 84 years ago or at an Art Nouveau comb she ran through her hair as a girl.

What does technology have to do with any of this? Obviously, the story of the RMS Titanic is, on a narrative level, a story of man-made grandiosity and hubris, a vision of progress and industry consumed by the ancient icebergs of the great ocean. And Cameron, in making a movie out of it with all the state-of-the-art visual effects that the money of two major studios could buy, knows that he’s working in the same tradition of deluded ambition and extravagance, ready to be undone by forces beyond his control. But he’s built that idea into the aesthetic of his film. The ship is destroyed by the forces of nature, of course, but also, the smart-aleck dudes who find the wreck are emotionally undone by the story of a doomed love affair. In Cameron’s world, these are essentially the same things: The Avatar movies, for example, are all about humans with superior machinery and firepower being defeated by Na’vi warriors who are in direct touch with the natural world — which includes not just oceans and forests and animals but also forces like love, constancy, patience, and family.

And Cameron knows to use technology for both sensation and emotion. For all the great effects in Titanic — all those impressive shots of the ship charging through the sea, not to mention the harrowing images of the vessel’s stern hanging in the air as CGI people drop off it — the one that always blows me away is far more intimate. In what is perhaps the film’s most transporting and romantic moment, our lovers stand tightly against each other at the bow of the ship. Jack tells Rose to close her eyes, and when she opens them, she feels like she’s flying through the waves. Framed by the light of an orange sunset, they look out at the blue expanse, their hands gently a-tangle, and kiss. But then, slowly, the shiny new ship around them transforms into a bleak, barnacled wreck, and blue darkness consumes them. The blending of the images is so gradual that young Rose’s shawl is left fluttering phantomlike in the depths for an instant before it, too, fades away. The camera then pulls back to reveal that we’re back in the present, looking at an image of that submerged, decaying bow on a monitor. It then pulls back further to reveal the aged Rose’s face, watching and remembering.

Here’s a scene that gains power as the image morphs before our eyes — a tender reminder that nothing lasts forever and that it all can pass in the blink of an eye. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her suddenly becomes an elderly woman with her whole life behind her. Cameron is rightly regarded as a showman who uses visual effects and cinematic technique to blow us away with action and spectacle. But it’s in his ability to also use such tools to quieter, expressive ends that is where he shows his true artistry. And I don’t think he’ll ever top Titanic .

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Unsinkable: Titanic Untold review – story of disaster told through government inquiry

Reconstructing the US senate investigation that followed the disaster, this was made with a tiny fraction of James Cameron’s budget but has an authentic feel

I t’s been over a century since the RMS Titanic disaster, and while all manner of catastrophes have happened since, somehow this one haunts the imagination of storytellers and historians. You could blame James Cameron for making the blockbuster Titanic in 1997, but clearly that film was a symptom not a cause. Maybe it’s the scale of tragedy, the huge numbers of dead, or the adjacent fact that so many of them died senselessly because there weren’t enough lifeboats and the upper-class passengers were packed on to what boats there were before the tired, huddled masses travelling below deck could even get close.

Made on a limited budget that probably wouldn’t have covered the cost of supplying the crew with biscuits for Cameron’s epic, this dramatised feature tries to explore what was so significant, shocking and singular about the disaster. Instead of centring the action on the ship, Unsinkable revolves around a government inquiry hastily set in motion afterwards to find out if this was a simple act of God or the product of human error. Senator William Alden Smith (Cotter Smith) chairs the inquiry, calling on various crew members and survivors to testify. Some of the dialogue, adapted from the stage play Titanic to All Ships by Eileen Enwright Hodgetts on which this is based, sounds as if it was lifted straight from the congressional record, which is curiously pleasing to the ear and adds a tang of authenticity.

Elsewhere, a journalist named Alaine Richard (Fiona Dourif) digs into the story on her own, her path eventually crossing with Senator Smith, who occasionally pauses to talk to his wife, played by the great and all-too-rarely seen Karen Allen. There are flashbacks to what happened on the fateful night in question, and the film-makers must have been grateful that the tragedy happened in the dark because it covers up the fact that it looks like the lifeboats are being lowered into a swimming pool while a giant cutout ship capsizes in the background.

• Drama films
• Period and historical films
• The Titanic

Most viewed

Titanic Review

23 Jan 1998

194 minutes

We were, of course, all waiting for it to sink. Or at least list alarmingly. We had our snappily punning headlines and our cleverly worded "(Mad)man overboard!" captions. "James Cameron has spent $200 million on a movie and it's a dog. He's finally had it!" we chortled. It was all going to be a great deal of fun. Only there's a slight problem. James Cameron has gone and delivered a spectacular, moving, utterly engrossing three-and-a-bit hour epic (stick that on your poster) of the kind they have putatively ceased making "any more". Bugger. There go all the albatross gags, then.

DiCaprio is Jack, a "poor boy" who wins himself a ticket home on the maiden voyage of the world's most famous - and soon to be infamous - ocean liner. Winslet is Rose, a "rich girl" cosseted by the strictures of post-Edwardian society and miserably engaged to beastly aristo Cal (Zane). In a fit of the vapours, she tries to fling herself from the prow into Davy Jones' Locker, Jack wrestles her from the seaweedy clutches of the deep, their soulful eyes meet and... well, anyone vaguely acquainted with the obstacles routinely thrown up before young couples in period costume who are that much "in love" will be unsurprised to learn that a number of insurmountable obstacles (the kind that take a couple of reels to be surmounted) get lobbed in their way. Oh, and the boat sinks.

On paper, this should be a nauseatingly dreadful, utterly manipulative, saccharine-dusted gob of tedious pap. On the big screen - and if you've got any sense you'll catch it on the biggest screen you can find - it manages effortlessly to overcome the corny predictable plot, period cliche and "you know the ending" ending, seducing with honest, old-fashioned storytelling bolted to special effects sequences that take the breath away. Like one of its obvious influences Gone With The Wind, the most impressive FX sequences are not the obvious boat upturning sequences but the digitally created moments you don't notice aren't real. The steam emerging from people's mouths being one example, and the shots of the boat itself charging through the Atlantic, never drawing attention to the fact that only half of it exists in a mainframe in Burbank.

DiCaprio and Winslet are horribly attractive as the youngsters caught first in the nasty snobbism of the hierarchical world around them and then in the nasty terror of the boat sinking. Which is when the romance turns to action, and for the last hour and a bit we are treated to Cameron flexing his action muscles.

Walls of brine crash down corridors, those holding only third class tickets are locked below decks and drown in their hundreds, and in the final moments the ship upends delivering an incredible shot of our heroes hurtling face first into the sea still clinging to the ship while hapless passengers who have chosen to jump plunge by.

Here Cameron proves, as he hinted at in The Abyss, that while you can count the action directors to rival him on the fingers of one finger (John Woo), he is also perfectly capable of delivering big screen emotion. Titanic is not subtle by any stretch of the imagination but it will leave even the most cynical, heartless swine with a lump in the throat. And for once it won't be their lunch coming up.

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Unsinkable: Titanic Untold Reviews

Mildly engaging and occasionally provocative, but somewhat clunky, shallow and undercooked.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2024

"Unsinkable” is an extremely commendable and well-intentioned project that’s only held back by an occasionally stodgy disposition and the rare moments when the film’s seams peak through its otherwise glossy exterior.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 12, 2024

This straightforward drama is likely to entertain history buffs, especially those who've been entranced by the lore around the Titanic.

Full Review | Apr 12, 2024

The film-makers must have been grateful that the tragedy happened in the dark because it covers up the fact that it looks like the lifeboats are being lowered into a swimming pool while a giant cutout ship capsizes in the background.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 10, 2024

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Titanic Parent Guide

Just like the treasure-hunting crew he portrays, this motion picture has mined catastrophe for cash profits--and thrown the sanctity of life and moral responsibility aside..

Titanic sails again as the film re-releases to home video in 3D. Concentrating more on fiction than fact, Director James Cameron's Titanic depicts the catastrophic voyage of the unsinkable ship through the eyes of young lovers Jack and Rose (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet).

Release date April 4, 2012

Run Time: 194 minutes

Official Movie Site

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by rod gustafson.

It’s amazing how Hollywood can convert disaster into dollars time and time again. James Cameron, the creator of Titanic turned the biggest ship and sea tragedy into one of the greatest money making film of all time—and didn’t even have a moment in the closing credits to dedicate his windfall to the memory of those who perished. Just a minor oversight.

I acknowledge Titanic as one of the most technically advanced and visually awe inspiring movies ever made. Cameron’s task in directing this production is in a league with the skills and organization required to run a small country. After all, Titanic’s grosses far exceed the GNP of a small nation. But why would he choose to take a story chock full of amazing feats of heroism and tragedy, and instead create two fictional characters to be the main focus of the film?

The film contains unnecessary frontal female nudity, implied intercourse complete with orgasmic comments, language I think would even offend the steerage class, and glamorization of gambling, drinking, and smoking. Applauded by adoring fans, this young lovers’ story also teaches that an opportunity for sex is something you should grasp now—just in case your ship sinks.

In an opening scene, Rose, now 101 years old, accuses an exploration team of not getting the Titanic experience—but Cameron missed the boat too. Just like the treasure-hunting crew he portrays, this motion picture has mined catastrophe for cash profits—and thrown the sanctity of life and moral responsibility aside.

Original Theatrical Release: December 13, 1997

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Rod Gustafson

Titanic rating & content info.

Why is Titanic rated PG-13? Titanic is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language.

Pushing the limits of the PG-13 rating, Titanic includes multiple views of a woman’s naked breasts (as she poses for an artist), a sexual encounter between an unmarried teen couple (some activity shown), a sexual expletive along with other mild and moderate profanities, and glamorization of gambling, drinking and smoking. As well, suicide is contemplated and violent threats against life are made. The peril and trauma of the passengers on board the fated ship may also be disturbing to some viewers.

- Frequent portrayals of violent death and corpses (some involving children).

-A character contemplates suicide.

Sexual Content:

- Breast nudity in a non-sexual context.

- Implied sexual relations.

- One use of the sexual expletive in a non-sexual context, and one crude hand gesture.

- Frequent use of scatological slang and cursing.

- Infrequent use of profanity and mild sexual slang.

Alcohol / Drug Use:

- Frequent portrayals of tobacco and alcohol use.

- Depictions of gambling.

Page last updated July 17, 2017

Titanic Parents' Guide

Why do you think the scriptwriters of this film chose to focus more on fiction than fact? If you were to tackle this topic, how would you handle it?

Touted as “unsinkable,” the passengers aboard the Titanic were at first slow to respond to the seriousness of their situation. Can you think of other instances when apathy has caused people to neglect warnings? How did things change when the reality of the danger began to dawn? How did the “every man for himself” attitude adversely affect the survival rate? What things could have been done differently?

The most recent home video release of Titanic movie is September 10, 2012. Here are some details…

Home Video Notes: Titanic

Release Date: 10 September 2012

After a successful re-launch of the Titanic on theatrical screens in April of 2012, this movie is being released to the home video market in Blu-ray (Blu-ray/DVD/UV Digital Copy) and 3D (Blu-ray 3D/Blu-ray/DVD/UV Digital Copy). Both editions offer the following bonus extras:

- In-depth exploration of the film with James Cameron

- Documentary footage produced by National Geographic with James Cameron that brings the world’s leading RMS Titanic experts together to discuss why and how the ship sank

- Three audio commentaries

- Sixty behind-the-scenes featurettes

- Featurette on the visual effects

- Thirty deleted scenes

- Over 2,000 archival photographs

DVD Notes: Titanic

Release Date: 25 October 2005

Paramount Home Entertainment enshrines this epic film in a three-disc Special Collector’s Edition . The over three hours movie will be spit onto two of those DVDs, along with commentaries by Director James Cameron and cast (Kate Winslet & Gloria Stuart) and crewmembers (Producer Jon Landau and Executive Producer Rae Sanchini). Historical background and a visual effects breakdown of the stunts are also provided.

The third disc offers on opportunity to watch 29 deleted scenes (46 minutes worth of them) and an alternate ending. Other bonuses include behind-the-scenes and making-of footage, more historical tidbits, and the Celine Dion music video of My Heart Will Go On .

Related home video titles:

James Cameron returned to the subject of the Titanic for another film project—this time a documentary exploring the wreck at the bottom of the ocean called .

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The Story Behind Mark Wahlberg Auditioning For Titanic And Why He Knows James Cameron Thought He Was 'Unfocused'

Why Mark Wahlberg believes he didn’t get the part in Titanic.

A lot of talented actors auditioned for Titanic to play Jack Dawson, like Matthew McConaughey , Jared Leto , Christian Bale , and more. Ultimately, Leonardo DiCaprio won the role of Rose Dewitt Bukater’s doomed love interest, and Titanic went on to become one of DiCaprio’s best movies . What you may not know is that Mark Wahlberg also auditioned for the romance-drama film, and he reveals what made James Cameron think he was too “unfocused” for the role.

Normally the first part of an audition is an actor going through a script reading. They either get the script in advance or are handed it on the spot. In the case of Mark Wahlberg ’s audition for Titanic, his experience was a little different once he met up with James Cameron. While speaking on Josh Horowitz’s podcast Happy Sad Confused, Wahlberg explained why the Canadian filmmaker probably thought the Bostonian actor was too “unfocused” to take on Jack Dawson.

Wasn’t really interested even in reading. I was like, you know, I really love Jim Cameron. I was so excited about Jim Cameron. I was like, yo, is that your Hummer outside? He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re supposed to be having a meeting.’ And so I was like, let’s go for a ride. Can I drive it? And drove his Hummer around with him. And he was like, ‘This kid’s not focused.’

So compared to going along with a script reading, Mark Wahlberg was more focused on driving James Cameron ’s Hummer. And no, The Italian Job actor did not shout out the famous Titanic line “I’m King of the world!” It would be kind of hard for him to do that without a script reading. James Cameron is known for being a total perfectionist, I can understand the visionary filmmaker being turned off by an actor showing more focus on his car than his screenplay. You can watch the interview for yourself on Instagram below:

A post shared by Josh Horowitz (@joshuahorowitz) A photo posted by on

The year Titanic came out still wasn’t a bad year for Mark Wahlberg, as he received high praise in Paul Thomas Anderson ’s Boogie Nights. However, the Academy Award nominee almost said no to the period drama because he was turned off by the subject matter of portraying a porn actor. However, this script he actually did read and was slowly won over by it.

If you can believe it, there used to be a rumor that there was a feud going on between Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg during the casting of Boogie Nights . Paul Thomas Anderson ended up squashing the “urban legend” by explaining that shooting Boogie Nights would have conflicted with DiCaprio filming Titanic which is why he turned it down . So it was all just a matter of scheduling conflicts. It looks like Wahlberg got his big movie the same year DiCaprio got his, so 1997 gave them both success in different projects.

Mark Wahlberg revealed that James Cameron may have found the actor “unfocused” for Titanic due to wanting to ride the filmmaker’s Hummer rather than read his script. Even if the box office-winning film isn’t listed under Wahlberg’s best movies , he at least had Boogie Nights that year to help make a name for himself in the film industry.

To learn more about the Ted actor’s future projects, take a look at our 2024 movie releases . Titanic is also available to watch with your Paramount+ subscription and your Amazon Prime subscription .

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Experience James Cameron’s Titanic, the global box office phenomenon and winner of 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture (1997). Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet light up the screen in this unforgettable tale of forbidden love and courage set against the ill-fated maiden voyage of the “unsinkable” Titanic.

Over 15 hours of SPECIAL FEATURES including…

· NEW - TITANIC: Stories From The Heart

Director James Cameron, producer Jon Landau and star Kate Winslet share memories and favorite moments, and recount the challenges of making the greatest love story in cinema history. Go back in time with film clips, photos and behind-the-scenes moments.

· NEW - TITANIC: 25 YEARS LATER WITH JAMES CAMERON

James Cameron explores the enduring myths and mysteries of the shipwreck, and mounts tests to see whether Jack could have fit on that raft and survived.

· NEW - Fan Poster Gallery

Product Description

Experience James Cameron’s Titanic, the global box office phenomenon and winner of 11 Academy Awards® including Best Picture (1997)*. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet light up the screen in this unforgettable tale of forbidden love and courage set against the ill-fated maiden voyage of the "unsinkable" Titanic.

Product details

• Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.78:1
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.78 x 5.43 x 0.63 inches; 4.16 ounces
• Director ‏ : ‎ James Cameron
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ 4K
• Release date ‏ : ‎ December 5, 2023
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet
• Dubbed: ‏ : ‎ French, Spanish
• Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English, French, Spanish
• Language ‏ : ‎ English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Studio ‏ : ‎ PARAMOUNT
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CK3ZWT7X
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 2
• #26 in Drama Blu-ray Discs
• #47 in Action & Adventure Blu-ray Discs

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Review: TITANIC THE MUSICAL at Hale Centre Theatre

The production runs through May 11th at Hale Centre Theatre in Gilbert, AZ.

BroadwayWorld Guest Contributor David Appleford returns with his perspective on Hale Centre Theatre’s production of TITANIC THE MUSICAL.

The challenge a director faces when producing a large-scale musical designed to be seen on a proscenium stage and adapting it for a theatre-in-the-round presentation can often seem insurmountable. Not every show is going to work. Yet somehow, Hale Centre Theatre in Gilbert has proven time and time again how effectively it can be done.

Performing now at Hale’s theatre-in-the-round until May 11 is the gargantuan Broadway musical TITANIC , originally called TITANIC A NEW MUSICAL ,, now referred to as simply TITANIC THE MUSICAL .

Long before the show opened in ‘97, rumors regarding elaborate sets going wrong, hydraulics breaking down, a budget rocketing sky-high, and last-minute concerns that the show wouldn’t even open, had gossip mongers salivating. But the show did go on. It even swept the Tonys, winning all of its five nominations, including Best Musical. Reviews were tepid, mixed to good, and even though the show closed without turning a profit, the overall reaction from audiences was generally positive. It was the revival two years later in 1999 that earned the praise.

Streamlined from the original jumbo set design – those hydraulic pumps were now gone – the premiere in Los Angeles of the first national tour earned praise in much the same way that the revival of The Color Purple did once it eliminated its original scenic design and put the focus squarely on the performers. With Hale Centre Theatre and a forum that possesses no set or backdrops in the traditional sense, focus on the performers is even more concentrated, and it works incredibly well. Director Cambrian James has presented a unique retelling of the horrific event that occurred on April 15, 1912, when the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage hit an iceberg and sank in the middle of the Atlantic. A vessel that needed 54 lifeboats but had only 20 resulted in the drowning deaths of more than 1,500 passengers.

Writer Peter Stone has used facts and figures to keep the events of what occurred during those early hours of April 15 as accurate as possible. Because of that, a problem the book can’t possibly overcome is that there are no surprises. Due to films such as A Night To Remember plus the phenomenal global success of James Cameron’s film, the events as they happened are by now too well known and documented. We already know what’s going to take place and how.

But that doesn’t mean attention wanders. Aware of what lies ahead, the stupidity of the company owner, J. Bruce Ismay (Cameron Rollins) demanding more speed and trying to override a captain’s authority can’t help but induce an emotional response. And a steward telling 3rd-class passengers, “ You wait down here until you are told ,” as the water rises while the 1st-class are already climbing aboard the lifeboats will cause a similar sense of anger.

But among the high-drama, there remains the occasional moment of good humor. When third-class passengers talk of their hopes and dreams in America where they’re certain they can rise above their station, the pronunciation of American cities, names they have only seen in print but have never heard, are spoken literally. Albuquerque becomes ‘ Albie-cue-cue, ’ while Maryland becomes ‘ Mary-Land .’

That lack of worldly knowledge also extends to the 1st-class. At a dinner table when the recently married Madeleine Astor, a nineteen-year-old who has married a wealthy man twenty-nine years her senior, is asked how did she find Paris, she replies without any sense of irony, “ I didn’t have to. John knew exactly where it was. ” The line, as writer Peter Stone intended, is meant to show how guileless the young bride is. Being wealthy is not an automatic indication of knowledge and intelligence. The scene is usually portrayed with the youthful character possessing a look of concern as the older dinner table guests around her laugh at her innocence, but, as directed, the character laughs along with everyone else as if she had intended it to be a clever witticism. The moment, as presented here, misses the point.

And as often occurs in a Hale Centre Theatre production, some of the action is performed on a balcony above the entrance tunnel on the northwest side of the auditorium. While most seated in the round can enjoy the effectiveness of having the action from the ship’s bridge conducted on this elevated level, several audience members seated in that section have to either crank their necks to see or simply listen to what is being said, unable to view anything from their seated position. A climactic moment when the production’s one special effect takes place - the deck begins to lean forward as the ship eventually sinks - will be lost on those seated in a section of the theatre’s northwest side; they simply won’t be able to see it.

Like a 70’s disaster movie where over time you get to know certain individuals and become concerned with their fates, among the real-life characters of the ship’s designer (Tyler Thompson), its company owner, and the ship’s captain (Bryan Stewart), writer Stone has incorporated among the passengers characters representing the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-classes, many of whom were also based on their real-life counterparts. But they’re more snapshots of an assemblage rather than central figures; there’s no one person you’re with or get to know for any length of time. In other words, there’s no Kate and Leo, though amusingly, when it comes to the Irish 3rd-class down below in steerage, many of the women’s first names are Kate.

The cast of TITANIC THE MUSICAL  is a true ensemble. No one performer stands out more than the other. The real star of the show is Maury Yeston’s score. Like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd , Yeston’s TITANIC THE MUSICAL is operatic in style and epic in scope. Full-throated, inspiring robust voices fill the house.

In the way that radio is often referred to as a theatre of the mind, it’s in the mind of the audience where the full horrors of an enormous passenger ship, a floating city considered unsinkable, happens. There is no tilting of a stage, and no objects, such as a tea trolley eerily rolling from one side of the stage to the other, to be seen. Instead, the reality of what is happening is conjured in an audience’s mind by the behavior, the panicked dialog, and the superb singing voices of the large ensemble. Plus, a widescreen projection on the walls of the theatre’s east and west sides, displays time, dates, and settings, so that at any point in the show you know exactly where you are. The moment when the ship’s lookout declares, “ Dear Mother of God! Iceberg ahead! ” you’ll have goosebumps.

Hale Centre Theatre ~  https://haletheatrearizona.com/  ~  50 W. Page Avenue, Gilbert, AZ ~ 480-497-1181

Graphic credit to Hale Centre Theatre

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