No Iceberg Needed
People don't say Hello anymore. They just ask if you've seen Titanic. To answer you all very quickly, no I haven't and you know what, I DON'T WANT TO! Every time I have said that, people will gasp and say, "But you HAVE to!"
Since when has the entire world known what I HAVE to do for entertainment? Titanic barely appealed to me before it went overschedule and overbudget. I saw it as another leonardo DiCaprio love story where he pretends to act and millions of teenage girls flock to the theaters because "he's so cute." Since I don't believe Leo is all that adorable, there was no reason for me to see it. But the story of the Titanic itself does intrigue me, so I held back my reservations.
Then the first flock of people came back from the theaters to tell me about it. The first words out of their mouths were "Everybody was crying..." First rule of personal entertainment: I don't like to cry. I'll grant that I have cried at movies I considered wonderful, but usually it wasn't the driving force of my enjoyment. Second rule of personal entertainment: I don't like it when people die. I have problems with mass destruction and horrible death tolls. Even though the enjoyment of seeing Leo die might be a reason to see this movie, it doen't justify sitting through three hours of a sinking boat.
I also don't enjoy motif stories without anything new. The stereotypical spoiled rich girl is unhappy with her life, and of course she's expected to marry someone she doesn't love and has a problem with it. So she tries to kill herself and (gasp) in runs the poor boy with a fresh perspective on life. Of course to show that it isn't really love at first sight, because nobody will find THAT believable, they fight for a while. Then suddenly they figure out they ARE madly in love, and they (ahem) fool around. The original fiance runs around threatening people, and you can't forget some sort of disaster that draws our hero and heroine together even more. It is a bit original to have the guy die, but it's been done before and doesn't enhance the story.
James Cameron, the director/writer, himself has said, "Titanic is first and above all, a love story." I have news for everyone who feels I HAVE to see this movie: I don't like love stories. I especially don't like unrealistic ones that put the populace in the state of mind that love is beautiful, wonderful, and nothing in life can mess with it at all. Nope, if you fall in love, all your problems aurtomatically disappear, those are the rules. For me, a true love story is more along the lines of Good Will Hunting. Two people meet and like each other, but both of them have to get through loads of baggage before they can make a real relationship, and it almost tears them apart. Love is nat all sunshine and roses, and for people to expect that only sets them up for disappointment.
Oh, and the special effects argument isn't going to work on me either. So they built a big model boat. Stan Winston and his team has built at least two or three life-size T-Rexes for Jurassic Park and the sequel. The underwater shots of the wreckage are the same as the ones that have been shown on the Discovery Chennel for years. As for the Computer Generated Imaging, I've been a big follower of CGI and special effects for years and I'm not impressed. Since the previews, interviews, and news stories all have shown scenes of the boat sinking, then there isn't much more for me to see. To speak of Jurassic Park yet again, the CGI dinosaurs seem much more challenging than a boat and a few hundred people. The wildebeest stampede in The Lion King showed it isn't difficult to duplicate things to make a crowd. The television series Babylon 5 has been doing first rate CGI for five years now, and the ships, exposions, and aliens have always been just as good as Titanic, on a MUCH smaller budget.
That's another point: the budget. Did Cameron really need to spend $208+ million on a movie? I know it was his dream, but that kind of budget is extremely unneccesary. Does anyone know how many tacos that would buy for starving children? How many Habitat for Humanity homes it could build for the less fortunate? Instead it went to a movie full of cliches, decent special effects, and bad acting. If I thought Cameron might donate some of the profits to charity or something I might forgive him, but it's simply an insane figure to pay. Yet the world helped them make it back and then some, and made it the highest grossing movie of all time. I suppose that should say something about our society, but I'm not sure what that is, or if I even want to know.
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