Retrospective: "Titanic" Still King of the Movie World 25 Years Later

James Cameron's magnum opus has never let go of its place in our hearts - thank God for that.

November 4, 2022

At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, RMS Titanic struck an iceberg off the northeastern coast of Canada. The impact opened six holes along the port side, flooding the forward compartments with the icy waters of the North Atlantic. It could remain afloat with four of those compartments breached, but no more. Unfortunately for the 2,200 souls aboard, five compartments had flooded.

The following two and a half hours were many things. They were a mad dash to the far reaches of the inevitable as 1,500 people flocked to the rising stern, desperate for survival. They were a testament to ineptitude, as the poorly-trained officers struggled to maintain order, launching lifeboats well below capacity. They were an answer to how much our words are worth. If granted the opportunity to save a life, even if we believe seizing it means risking ours, do we take it? Only 13 people got pulled from the sea and onto the one lifeboat that came back.

But more than anything else, they were a condemnation of human arrogance. Humor aside, The Onion was not wrong to say, “World’s Largest Metaphor Strikes Iceberg.” After all, Titanic’s shipbuilders had made that promise: four forward compartments could get flooded without compromising the ship’s buoyancy. For many, it rendered the vessel “unsinkable.”

The sinking inspired legislation to prevent future disasters, but even 110 years later, questions still abound. Why was a ship allowed to carry so few lifeboats? How could we have believed that man is more powerful than nature? How could those tasked with ensuring safety let sentiment take precedent over simple science? Iron is denser than water.

These questions can never get answered, but appreciation for what smacked us across the face that night birthed the necessary perspective to do something incredible. It did not grant us the empathy to respect the fragility of life and save us from ourselves. It did not turn back time to spare all those who plunged to a painful death in the freezing sea.

It did, however, make a great movie.

In the summer of 1996, James Cameron ventured to Nova Scotia to undertake the premiere cinematic production of our time. It was a risky gambit, draping an old-fashioned romance against the most famous shipwreck in history. It was an even riskier one to greenlight it.

Titanic was an unparalleled undertaking. The “unsinkable” ship was re-constructed over four months and placed in a 17-million-gallon water tank. Cameron was committed to recounting the tragedy truthfully, but that did not stop the public from assuming the worst.

Never have we been so united in low expectations or dismissive of a film before production began. Titanic was not going to succeed: it was too ambitious, too costly. It was Waterworld with a love story. At long last, Cameron’s boundless egotism would do him in.

It all seemed to be going according to plan. Kate Winslet chipped an elbow during filming. Cameron, whose reputation as a hot-tempered perfectionist was the worst kept secret in Hollywood, grew more incensed by the hour, reportedly berating people over even minor transgressions. A disgruntled crew member laced the buffet soup with PCP, sending 50 people to the hospital. Numerous delays ballooned the budget to twice the original $100 million, becoming the most expensive movie ever made.

20th Century Fox was so intimidated by financing the film that they teamed with Paramount to support the troubled production, ultimately sinking $200 million into a movie no one thought would succeed.

All we had to do was wait. Wait to die, wait to live, wait for a $1.843 billion-dollar gross that would never come.

Until, of course, the movie got released in December 1997, and a cinematic phenomenon was born. Titanic slowly burned into the biggest movie ever made, selling out theaters with such remarkable consistency that it broke records across the globe and stayed in theaters for nearly a year.

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The previous highest-grossing film, Jurassic Park, made $913 million at the worldwide box office. Titanic doubled that. The next highest-grossing movie, Independence Day, made $817 million worldwide, less than the $843 million Titanic brought in after it reached an unprecedented $1 billion worldwide. It scored a record-tying 14 Academy Award nominations and 11 wins, including one of the most foregone Best Picture wins ever in the Oscars' most successful telecast ever, averaging 57.25 million viewers. “My Heart Will Go On,” the soaring end-credits ballad, sold 18 million copies and cemented Celine Dion as the world’s premier songstress.

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Titanic. Never had we been so sure, never had we been so wrong.

Of course, with immense adoration comes brutal backlash. It was overlong, poorly written, insincere in its sap, and derivative in its execution. Men who once wept as Leonardo DiCaprio sank into the sea jeered the film for its schmaltz and effeminacy. Women who once swooned over the star-crossed lovers sharing a kiss over the setting sun saw their affinity derided as insanity.

The question is simple. Which does Titanic deserve: the love we bore or the hate that replaced it?

The answer would seem both: in many respects, the writing is poor; the story is derivative; the movie is overwrought. Yet, for all its abject weakness, Titanic itself is not weak, and for one reason: all its weaknesses are its greatest strengths.

On a third-class deck, American artist Jack Dawson sits with two companions. One asks Jack, holding his sketchbook, if he profits from his drawings.

Jack does not hear him.

In the distance, a young woman emerges against the rail of the first-class deck. She notices him staring and darts her eyes away but briefly returns to reciprocate his gaze. She cannot help but give in; Jack is not seeing her with his eyes: he is looking at her with his soul.

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The resulting affair begins with a subverted suicide attempt that unlocks a woman shackled to convention and her love for a man desperate to relieve her. The forces seek to keep them apart, and the rules of their world dictate they can never be together, and within that comes a very ordinary love story that does little to defy the principles of cinematic romances. Alas, in that respect for the familiar, Titanic proves something important about its two lovers:

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Nothing on earth could come between them.

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We have lost ourselves in ways that Jack and Rose remind us to recognize and correct, which is as true today as in 1997. Younger generations projected themselves onto a love story piloted by the carefree liberation of the world’s biggest heartthrob. Yet, Titanic's repeat audience was predominantly older moviegoers taken by its old-fashioned melodrama. Why?

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Because they were once Jack and Rose. We all were.

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Remember? The blind naïveté of young love; the infallibility of our mate; the contrived urgency of every disagreement we invented; the willingness to sacrifice life and limb regardless of the necessity to do so. They were the only tether to this unfair life we lead, which no one could understand except the one we made love to in the back of a car.

Rose is right: it doesn’t make sense. Love never felt like it added up. We were so convinced of the hopelessness of our cause and the ill fate of our trajectory that intervention seemed impossible.

On paper, Titanic misses the mark occasionally, but even in its misfires, it finds that youthful drama. No wealthy white girl should equate traveling first class on a luxury liner to boarding a slave ship, just as her attempted suicide seems a disproportionate reaction to her circumstances, but that was us. Titanic is a teenage girl’s diary entry about the cute boy who’s never given her a second look, where at long last, she is the starlet and he the beggar, and it captures the melodrama. Would we have not found some inner defiance in whinging at our parents and forsaking being shrouded in enormous wealth for life under a bridge long before we were old enough to understand the value of that wealth and the impracticality of said life under a bridge? Would we not have leaped back onto a sinking ship with an ever-dwindling population of lifeboats? Would we not have taken every possible risk, disregarding feasibility, finance, fit, or life itself?

We are Jack and Rose, looking back at our younger selves in wonderment. We recognize that all-consuming passion within us, the kind that makes us see a roaring fire inside a beautiful woman we just met or a free-spirited adventurer in a guy that just saved us from leaping off the back of a ship for no reason. We recognize that there are other fish in the sea (1,517, to be exact), but that the heart needs what it needs.

As Rose kisses Jack goodbye and watches his frozen body sink into the sea, we empathize with the woman who's lost her true love and feel disappointment that Jack's purity was not his salvation. He has done everything a person could have done for Rose, and in that way, for us too.

He endured the awkward family dinners and taught us to do things we always wanted to try but never dared attempt. He was the king of the world because he conquered it in a way we do not. He did not define himself by trivialities or shape his worldview by convention. He transcended definition only to become easily defined, but in a way we always sought for ourselves without ever realizing the dream. He is every promise we ever made to ourselves. We may not wish to freeze to death in a shipwreck, but we do want to die with purpose rather than live with no aim at all.

We can never forget his cavalier approach to life, urging us to forgo convention to embrace the now. We can never forget how he forced us to tap into everything we had lost, inspiring us to do things we hadn't done in years and realize the fallacy of all the reasons we held back when we remembered we could not recall what they were in the first place. We cannot forget that our perspective does not mature as we believe it does. In our younger years, we decry the unfairness of life for not granting justice to the heart or allowing our whims to dictate our actions. As we age, we do the same thing while convincing ourselves otherwise. Titanic understands that it is the same. Jack saved us from ourselves. As we recall every moment before his face disappears into the dark, we know we can never let go.

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Titanic is a visual masterclass; we know this. The ship is grand and striking, but so is Cameron’s feel for the moment. The sky is colored warmly as Rose “flies” at the bow on Titanic’s last night above the surface, with Jack piloting her to romantic bliss. The ship's light illuminates the sea as it descends to its watery grave, shocking you out of the horror to marvel at the majesty. Cameron pulls back as a flare gets shot into the sky, minimizing the epic scale of the “unsinkable” ship to set in not only the hopelessness of the tragedy but the minuscule scale of it against the bigger picture: the ship is small, the people smaller. The sea is large, and it has no mercy.

That perspective defines Titanic. It respects its tragedy enough to portray it truthfully: a simple matter of man against nature. The world thrusts obstacles upon us, but we create some ourselves. It was not any passenger's vision to go down with the ship, but Rose leaps back onto Titanic and likely dooms both her and Jack in the process. Love will conquer all by our will or not, even in death.

We can dissect the dialogue, nitpick the CGI as a hypothermic Rose stares at the night sky, and snicker at the inclusion of a bizarre gun chase as Cal tries to murder Jack and Rose in a jealous rage.

But we cannot question the force of a movie so devoted to reminding us of our younger years that we gain insight into everything we have sacrificed for things that only matter conceptually.

As Rose dies, having returned the Heart of the Ocean to its rightful home, with a life full of memories buried in her deep ocean of secrets, those concepts get laid to rest. Love conquered death because Rose never let go. Living on others' terms is fruitless, and the only promise worth keeping is the one we choose to make. Rose swore to a man who understood her. She promised the love of her life, but in doing so, promised herself. No love is truer than that.

We can measure Titanic against the great cinematic romances and question its validity as an iconic love story, but we cannot deny the innate quality that makes it stick.

Few films entrance us like Titanic. Few films can arrest us so entirely that 25 years on, every viewing feels like the first. Of course, that is Titanic: Jack and Rose's first love, their first sense of great passion. When Rose drifts into memory and lets her heart wander, it feels for her just as it did in 1912.

Titanic was more than a movie: it was a cultural moment. It has everything: music and movie, man and woman, love and tragedy. We can rightly chastise it for not reaching an objective standard, but we cannot deny all the ways that proves irrelevant. Rare are the films that inspire the sort of introspection Titanic elicits; even rarer are ones that do so with such innocence.

Meaning rarely comes from the gimmicky nature of the movies we praise for having substance. Life matters in the ways we allow, and films that help us understand that matter most. Our time is limited and passing quicker than we realize. Titanic reminds us to steer our lives in the direction we wish and seize the moment before it is too late. If we cannot do that, we should celebrate a movie for helping us.

Say what you will, but Titanic put us in a vice grip in the late 90s and, for all the twists and turns down the bumpy road to legacy, has, deservedly, never truly let go.