Titanic

Titanic is a great behemoth whose plot is not particularly subtle and whose characters are either black or white. In many ways, then, Titanic is a typical blockbuster of the kind Hollywood habitually churns out. Even so, the film made quite an impression on me. The love story between the upper-class girl Rose and the poor lad Jack was both banal and unrealistic, but Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio made me believe in the characters. Secondly, the film was, quite simply, visually overwhelming, and while James Cameron may not have a late-nineties angle on the tragic events, the film's visual expression is at any rate the result of the most modern film technology. Although several critics favour the second part of the film, in which Cameron as an action director gets the chance to show what he can do, I liked the first part just as much, in which the characters were established and the ship and its forces were introduced.

Titanic begins in the present day, when the more than 100-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater sees on TV that the treasure hunter Brock Lovett is searching for the precious diamond the Heart of the Ocean, which belonged to the millionaire heir Cal Hockley, a survivor of the Titanic disaster. In a safe salvaged from the wreck, Lovett has found a drawing of a beautiful naked woman wearing the Heart of the Ocean, and the drawing is dated 14 April 1912, the day before the Titanic sank. The woman in the drawing is Rose, who joins the expedition as she tells her dramatic and tragic story aboard the Titanic.

At the end of the film the action returns to the present, where Rose, as her last act before she passes away and joins her beloved Jack, throws the Heart of the Ocean into the sea, where it belongs, down to the Titanic.

James Horner's fine soundtrack for the film is currently at number one among the best-selling CDs and has been for a couple of weeks. Nothing like it has been seen before, I believe.