Titanic Reviews

I had few problems with this film, and I have heard a lot of criticisms saying it is overlong and overrated. True, it is over three hours long, but I was amazed that it goes by so quickly. I don't think it is overrated at all, I think the IMDb rating is perfectly decent. The film looks sumptuous, with gorgeous costumes and excellent effects, and the direction from James Cameron rarely slips from focus. Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his best performances as Jack, and Kate Winslet is lovely as Rose. David Warner, a great actor, steals every scene he's in. The story is very rich in detail, and is hot on character development, obvious with the love story which is very moving when it needs to be, though in the first bit of the movie it is a little slow. The last hour is extremely riveting, and I will confess that I was on the edge of my seat, when the Titanic sank. I will also say that the last five minutes were very moving. The music score by James Horner was lovely, though I never was a huge fan of the song My Heart will Go On. The 1996 miniseries was good, but suffered from undeveloped scenarios and some historical inaccuracies. Overall, I give Titanic an 8.5/10. Bethany Cox.

A seventeen-year-old aristocrat (Kate Winslet), expecting to be married to a rich claimant (Billy Zane) by her mother, falls in love with a kind but poor artist (Leonardo DiCaprio) aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.

The first thing that is really striking about this film is that it came from James Cameron, who is much better known for science fiction films like "Terminator", "Avatar" and "Aliens". He is not the first person that comes to mind when you think of historical fiction romances. And yet, he nailed it. "Titanic", despite its length of three hours, was a huge success and may have sold more VHS copies than any other movie.

But beyond the romance, this is actually a rather decent movie. I cannot say why, it is something hard to put one's finger on. Most likely, it has something to do with Billy Zane, who is more or less the greatest thing about the film.

'Titanic' is a rare brilliant classic which was directed and written by James Cameron, this very good director also wrote and directed a great movie known as 'Avatar' which is currently the highest grossing movie worldwide

'Titanic' is only the second highest grossing movie worldwide and deserves all the billions it made, the real ship has been underwater for over 100 years and how come this is one of the only good movie versions of it?

Since 'Titanic' was well received and grossed over $2 billion at the box office worldwide, I just had to watch it, it also has actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet who give some pretty good performances, the rest of the cast are also really good (Gloria Stuart, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bill Paxton, Bernard Hill) and the story telling of 'Titanic' is just very clever

But what a very smart beginning; a bunch of treasure searchers find the Titanic searching for a for a necklace with a rare diamond known as the Heart of the Ocean. But in a safe, all they find is a drawing of a young woman wearing the necklace and nothing else. The drawing is dated April 14, 1912, the day Titanic hit the iceberg and sunk. An old woman, Rose Dawson Calvert claims to be the person in the drawing, she then visits Lovett and tells a story of her experiences aboard Titanic and how she fell in love with Jack Dawson, a poor artist who wins tickets aboard the ship in a game of poker

But what a very sad ending, Titanic sinks and shortly afterwards, Jack dies of hypothermia and Rose blows a whistle to grab the attention of a boat searching for survivors

Even though the ending is very sad, when Titanic starts sinking, the movie becomes really amazing and for only the second time in history, they actually show the ship breaking in half and just how they show all the sets flooding is quite incredible

'Titanic' is a masterpiece that made Leonardo DiCaprio more famous (he became famous for his best performance 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape') and Kate Winslet a big star as well (who was never famous before)

The first two 'Terminator' movies ('The Terminator' and 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day') were written and directed by James Cameron and were praised by everyone, I have never seen either of them but I have high expectations and I really hope to enjoy them

To conclude, 'Titanic' is definitely one of my favorite movies, a huge move for James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and a must see for any movie lover (since everyone went to see it, you can only assume that over a billion people enjoyed it)

Titanic

// James Cameron pitched his idea of 'Romeo & Juliet on the Titanic' to 20th Century Fox, who were unsure of its commercial prospects but wanted a long partnership with him, they greenlit the project with an unprecedented $200m budget. Titanic was released in 1997 to become the highest-grossing film of all-time, earning two billion dollars. 20th Century Fox were very happy indeed to have taken the risk, but I'll bet they were as worried as everyone else that it was going to sink.
As the story goes, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) a poor young man who wins himself a ticket home on the maiden voyage of the world's most famous - and soon to be infamous - ocean liner. Rose (Kate Winslet) a rich girl internally dying amid the rigid control and duty of post-Edwardian society, forcibly and miserably engaged to beastly aristocrat Cal Hockley, the saviour to her family's debts. In a fit of sudden terror, she considers throwing herself into the ocean off the back of the ship, but heroic Jack saves her from a (pre-emptive) fate worse than death (cosseted social strictures) as he believes she wouldn't have jumped; his directness, optimism and artistry are to capture Rose's heart, but the only obstacle that tears them apart is the watery grave most of the passengers perish in. Old Rose recounts the events of 1912 with detail, frankness and surprising clarity in comparison to her fading short-term, but as she states, the only place Jack exists is in her memory, and by the end of the film, they are reunited upon her fulfilling his pre-death promise that she will last until old age after a happy, varied life, dying peacefully in her bed, however, not before physically (and metaphysically) returning the heart of the ocean necklace (as well as that of her own to Jack and the Titanic) to its rightful place, thus being reunited with her true love. Essentially, Titanic explores social position, class division and the stoicism and nobility of a bygone era, presenting us with the nature of human survival - its purest form is raw and instinctive during the sinking - the majority of the ship's officers and their critically bad actions and shoddy handling of the disaster. Perhaps the most shocking idea is the folly and laughable disbelief that any ship could ever possibly be unsinkable, and why was nobody educated in the dangers of travelling on ocean liners? Even more so, why weren't tests carried out of the possibilities such as iceberg collision compared with that of the poorly built engineering? Outdated safety features and tests were carried out during its production, and maritime regulations were not up to standard, lacking enough lifeboats to accommodate even half its passengers. Perhaps it could be said that the disaster was very much guaranteed. Titanic teaches the viewer that life is uncertain, the future unknowable and the unthinkable possible; no doubt the passengers were led to their deaths in the misguided belief the ship they were travelling upon was unsinkable, it is infamous for that press label alone and the deaths of 1, 514 people.
For any film fan, it is an undeniable spectacle of epic grandeur, action and romance. Despite its popularity, many people defy its power and refuse to acknowledge its brilliance. However, for three hours of cinematic splendour and pure entertainment, its a masterpiece. Try to derail it and you will come across as those cynical fools who bashed every James Cameron film for its lack of subtlety, but if you don't like it, that's your opinion. After all, who remembers the crowds of people, queues and revellers outside the cinema in 1997? Two-billion dollars worth make this the planet's favourite film, that's a fact.

I remember when this movie came out, it was a real rage. Everybody went to see it and there were those weird stories about some people who were going to see it 20 times... So, everybody went to see it ... except me. Indeed, I thought the whole thing was so overhyped, there was no way I was going to follow this crowd of sheep. Eventually, I watched it about two years later on my own terms and, to be honest, I didn't really like it. I think by now I have seen it about 3 times (it is my wife's favorite movie so no choice here...) but, even though I don't really like it, I don't hate it and I definitely can see why so many people love it though. Basically, it is a massive crowd-pleaser with broad characters, huge spectacle, not too much thinking and there is nothing wrong with that. Concerning Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, they both gave some solid performances but they did much better later on during their respective careers. On top of that, I have to admit that the directing was definitely solid with some impressive special effects and the last 60 minutes were quite amazing to behold. Eventually, the main issue I had was with the whole love story. I mean, there was definitely some chemistry between DiCaprio and Winslet but the whole thing felt terribly generic and pedestrian to me. Above all, I thought it was rather shocking to substitute one of the greatest disasters in history by some trivial love story (my point is that, when you hear the word 'Titanic', what comes to your mind first? A movie with a sappy love story or the tragedy itself? I bet the first one...). Still, I don't think it is overrated, I think it deserves all the millions it made, it remains a very well made drama, a classic, and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

A tragic love story featuring superb acting, plenty of drama, suspense and, of course, the famous musical score. This film thoroughly deserves its 11 Oscars and is a remarkable achievement by James Cameron, who has managed to create one of the saddest and most epic love stories of all time.

If Titanic was made in India:


1) There would be 10 times as many people on the ship

2) There would be a song with Kate Winslet in a white saree and of course singing in the rain

3) The movie would be called "Pyar Kiya To Marna Kya"

4) Hero and Heroine would float in cold water for days and still survive, but the villian would die on the first dip

5) The iceberg would be sent by the heroine's father to teach the hero a lesson

6) None of the women would float due to heavy designer sarees.

And last but not least

7) Half of the rescue boats would be reserved for SC/ST/OBC

for me Titanic is an overrated movie. The reason might be that i belong to the subcontinent and almost every movie here is an exaggerated love story where people are willing to die for someone they hardly know. the performance was good but movie is an average

After all these years, it's still the same old story:
Iceberg 1. Titanic 0.

But at least James Cameron's retelling of the haunting catastrophe of April 14 and 15, 1912, has the grace and decency to sound a few new notes even as it derives much of its power from that old mainstay: bad things happening to other people. It's rich with the secret pleasure of watching a small, posh floating city turn into a gigantic iron coffin and slide headfirst into the deep, taking with it 1,500 of the innocent and not nearly enough of the guilty.

You sit there horrified and yet an ugly worm deep in your brain whispers: Better them than me.

Titanophiles should have plenty to celebrate and plenty to complain about. On the positive side, Cameron expensively re-creates the sinking of the ship in accordance with the latest and best theory, informed by high-tech exploration of the wreck. Thus in this film, unlike "Titanic" of 1954 or "A Night to Remember" of 1958, the ship is not shudderingly gashed by the berg but merely penetrated by a stiletto of ice, spreading 12 square feet of damage over 300 feet of hull. Thus, too, the big baby, as she goes down prow first and elevates her stern to the stars – almost as if displaying a cosmic middle finger to the God who doomed her – does in fact break in two as her brittle, frozen steel shatters, perishing not with a whimper but a bang.

Still, in his urge to simplify, fictionalize and mythologize, Cameron ignores many of the fascinations of the doomed voyage and its gallant crew and passengers. The heroic, indefatigable Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, who emerged as the tragedy's hero, is nowhere to be seen, though he was everywhere that night and the last man plucked from the sea the next morning. No credit is given to the stalwart Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron of the Carpathia, who, by dashing through the ice to the site of the disaster, probably saved more lives than any other human agent. Nor is the dastardly rascal Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, who may have bribed his way into the boats, on hand. And where is the deeply annoying Henry Sleeper Harper, who escaped with his wife, his manservant and his Pekingese while 52 children in steerage drowned? It's partially this tapestry of character weak and strong, of angels and devils in attendance, that has locked the disaster into our imaginations.

Though Cameron glimpses the actual – heroine Molly Brown, villain J. Bruce Ismay, head of the White Star Line – mostly he replaces it with a thin, nearly inane melodrama that at least feels appropriate to the era. It's as if the film were written by a scriptwriter in 1912 fresh from reading stories in Woman's Home Companion – but completely unversed in the psychological complexities of Mr. James and Mr. Dreiser. The dialogue is so primitive it would play as well on title cards. This overlay of fiction pursues an unlikely Romeo-and-Juliet coupling in which poor starving artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio, forever blowing a hank of hair out of his eyes) falls in love with society slave Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet, alabaster yet radiant), much to her delight and the disgust and ultimate fury of her fiance, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). The Zane character – a Pittsburgh steel heir – inherits some of Duff Gordon's least attractive characteristics, but he's so broadly imagined a portrait of aristocratic knavery that he comes to seem almost a cartoon figure, like a William F. Buckley with hemorrhoids.

The whole framing story is a cartoon, so much so that it seems another element of doomed hubris: Cameron is a guy who thinks he can improve the story of the Titanic! He's like the producer in a famous L.A. writer's joke who knows how to make everything better. But this stroke does yield a meager benefit or two: One is a chase sequence set in the unstable bowels of the very wet ship as the witching hour of 2:20 a.m. approaches. As a device for taking a tour not only of the death of a ship but also the end of an era, it's quite efficient; as drama it's ludicrous. Moreover, Dawson is the mildest, the least threatening of rebels. He's no Wobbly or Red, not even an arty radical like Edward Steichen, just a kid who might someday sell covers to Boys' Life. Winslet's Rose is Cameron's one anachronism, a Thwarted Woman of our age thrust backward in time to represent Heroic Feminism in wild ways, such as smoking in public. Their love story is strictly for the puppies and the guppies.

It does yield a couple of amusing scenes, however: One is a kiss at the westernmost point of the ship – its very proboscis – as it steams toward New York. The clever camera captures their love and the hugeness of the structure behind them in one breathtaking shot. The other is an intellectual trope: Progressivized by her time in Europe, Rose has become a champion of the avant-garde; her newfound respect for the works of a fellow named Picasso and a chap named Freud signify her willingness to acknowledge the irrational in the universe. The manly men across the table from her – not merely Zane but also Titanic designer Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), Ismay (Jonathan Hyde) and Capt. E.J. Smith (Bernard Hill), head man of the ship itself, a true rogue's gallery of macho hubris – stand for that late-19th-century belief that nature is tameable, that man is master, that a ship could be unsinkable. They scoff, unaware that they are about to get a tutorial from God in the form of 10,000 tons of ice.

It need not be added that the movie is very long, since everything is long this year, including the line at the restrooms. It is, in fact, about 40 minutes longer than the actual sinking (which lasted 2 hours 40 minutes vs. 3 hours 20 minutes) and quite possibly more expensive. It should be added that, despite a slow start, the thing still goes from first point to last faster than any movie in the marketplace. Once that big ol' thang begins her last swoon – about an hour into it – you ain't looking no place else and you ain't going no place else.

This is Cameron at his best. Always thin in the imagination when it comes to conceiving the tissue of character and motive (typical Cameron motive, from his first hit, "Terminator": "He kills – that's all he does"), he's the apogee of techno-nerd filmmaker. Thus the movie's central wonder is that it puts you aboard the sinking ship, palpably and as never before.

In the early going Cameron foreshadows his narrative strategy when, in a not-so-interesting setup involving greedy high-tech grave robbers visiting the Titanic's resting place 12,500 feet beneath the waves, we see a computer-animated scenario of the sinking. The rhythms of that event will be the rhythms of the movie that follows, almost exactly: a long, seemingly dead time in the water as the first three compartments of the lower hull invisibly fill; the slow tip forward as, almost imperceptibly, the bow begins to settle, then disappear; the contrapuntal stately climb of the stern amid an increasing shrapnel of falling furniture, flying glass and tumbling bodies; and the final, cataclysmic death spasm as the triple-screwed stern juts straight up, like a white whale hellbent on showing the floundering, drowning Ahabs the futility of their puny humanity, and then roars downward toward 73 long years of undisturbed silence, leaving a sea full of frozen dead and a fleet of half-empty lifeboats.

Yet in all this spectacle, the scariest element isn't the crushing power of the water and its ability to bend, drown and twist, but its creepy insistence. Watching it trickle upward (actually the boat is trickling downward), almost a teacup at a time, a thin, clear gruel of death, almost no more than you'd leave on the bathroom floor if you forgot to tuck in the shower curtain, is somehow more unsettling than watching a bulkhead go and a dozen anonymous steerage victims being swept away.

Cameron captures the majesty, the tragedy, the fury and the futility of the event in a way that supersedes his trivial attempts to melodramatize it. I didn't give a damn about cutie-pies Leonardo and Kate, much less their vapid characters or the predictable Hollywood Ten social "issues" they represent, but I left with an ache for those lost 1,500, rich and poor alike, for the big ship in ruins, and for the inescapable meaning in it all.

It is the same old story: Pride goeth before the fall, even when the fall is through 12,500 feet of black, icy water.

WP

Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. A fictionalized account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, Gloria Stuart as Old Rose, and Billy Zane as Rose's fiancé, Cal Hockley. Jack and Rose are members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage.
Cameron's inspiration for the film was predicated on his fascination with shipwrecks; he wanted to convey the emotional message of the tragedy, and felt that a love story interspersed with the human loss would be essential to achieving this. Production on the film began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the actual Titanic wreck. The modern scenes were shot on board the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, which Cameron had used as a base when filming the wreck. A reconstruction of the Titanic was built at Playas de Rosarito, Baja California, and scale models and computer-generated imagery were also used to recreate the sinking. The film was partially funded by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, and, at the time, was the most expensive film ever made, with an estimated budget of $200 million.
Upon its release on December 19, 1997, the film achieved critical and commercial success. It equaled records with fourteen Academy Award nominations and eleven Oscar wins, receiving the prizes for Best Picture and Best Director. With a worldwide gross of over $1.8 billion, it was the first film to reach the billion dollar mark, remaining the highest-grossing film of all time for twelve years, until Cameron's next directorial effort, Avatar, surpassed it in 2010. Titanic is also ranked as the sixth best epic film of all time in AFI's 10 Top 10 by the American Film Institute. The film is due for theatrical re-release on April 6, 2012 in 3-D to commemorate the centenary of the Titanic setting sail.

In 1996, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his team explore the wreck of the RMS Titanic, searching for a necklace called the Heart of the Ocean. They believe the necklace is in Caledon "Cal" Hockley's safe, which they recover. Instead of the diamond, they find a sketch of a nude woman wearing it, dated April 14, 1912, the night the Titanic hit the iceberg. Rose Dawson Calvert finds out about the drawing, contacts Lovett, and says that she is the woman depicted. She and her granddaughter Elizabeth "Lizzy" Calvert visit Lovett and his team on his salvage ship. When asked if she knows the whereabouts of the necklace, Rose recalls her memories aboard the Titanic, revealing that she is Rose DeWitt Bukater, a passenger believed to have died in the sinking.
In 1912, 17-year-old first class passenger Rose boards the ship in Southampton, England with her fiancé Cal, the son of a Pittsburgh steel tycoon, and her mother, Ruth DeWitt Bukater. Ruth stresses the importance of Rose's engagement, because the marriage to Cal will solve the DeWitt Bukaters' hidden financial problems. Distraught by her engagement to Cal and the pressure her mother is putting on her, Rose considers suicide by jumping off the stern of the ship. Before she leaps, a drifter and artist named Jack Dawson intervenes and persuades her not to jump. When discovered with Jack on the stern, Rose lies to Cal and says that she was looking over the edge of the ship in curiosity, tripped by accident, and that Jack saved her. At Rose's insistence, Cal invites Jack to dinner the following night to show his appreciation.
By the next day, Jack and Rose have developed a tentative friendship, though Cal and Ruth remain wary of the young third-class man. Following the first-class dinner that night, Rose secretly joins Jack at a third-class party.
Cal and Ruth forbid Rose to see Jack, and Rose attempts to comply by rebuffing Jack's continuing advances. She soon realizes that she prefers him over Cal, and meets with him at the bow of the ship during what turns out to be the Titanic's final moments of daylight. They go to Rose's stateroom and she asks Jack to sketch her wearing nothing but the Heart of the Ocean, an engagement present from Cal. Afterward, the two flee Cal's bodyguard into the ship's cargo hold, where they make love. Then they go to the ship's forward well deck, where they witness the ship's collision with an iceberg and overhear the ship's officers and designer discussing its seriousness. Rose tells Jack that they should warn her mother and Cal.
Cal discovers Jack's drawing and a mocking note from Rose in his safe along with the necklace. Furious, he has his bodyguard slip the necklace into Jack's coat pocket, framing him for stealing it. Jack is arrested, taken down to the Master-at-arms's office and handcuffed to a pipe. Cal puts the necklace in his coat. Rose runs away from Cal and her mother (who has boarded a lifeboat) to find Jack, breaking him free with an axe.
Jack and Rose struggle back to the deck where Cal and Jack persuade her to board another lifeboat, Cal claiming that he has made an arrangement that will allow both men to get off safely. After she boards, Cal tells Jack that the arrangement is only for himself. As Rose's boat lowers, she realizes that she cannot leave Jack, and jumps back on board the Titanic to reunite with him. Infuriated, Cal takes a pistol and chases them into the flooding first-class dining saloon. After running out of ammunition, Cal realizes to his chagrin that he gave his coat with the diamond to Rose.
Meanwhile Frabizo and Tommy are trying to get a lifeboat but First officer Murdoch tries to keep men from boarding by pointing a pistol at them, Cal comes over and reminds him of there deal but Murdoch throw's the money he gave him back at him saying that it's worthless. One passenger tries to board but is shot by Murdoch then another passenger accidentally pushes Tommy which causes Murdoch to shoot him. Farbizo is angred by this and Murdoch is filled with guilt and shot's himself. With the situation now dire, he returns to the boat deck and boards a lifeboat by pretending to look after a lost child.
As the ship sinks the pipes break away and kill anyone in the way one of which was Farbizo. Captain Smith is also killed when water fill's up the control room that he has locked himself in.
As Jack and Rose return to the top deck, all lifeboats have departed and passengers are falling to their deaths as the stern rises out of the water. The ship breaks in half, and the stern side rises a full 90-degrees into the air. As it sinks slowly and completely, Jack and Rose ride the stern into the ocean. Jack helps Rose onto a nearby wall panel that will only support one person’s weight. As he hangs onto the panel, he assures her she will not die there and will instead die an old woman, warm in her bed. Meanwhile, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe has commandeered a lifeboat to return and search for survivors. He manages to save Rose, but Jack dies from hypothermia.
Rose and the other survivors are taken by the RMS Carpathia to New York, where Rose gives her name as Rose Dawson. She hides from Cal on Carpathia's deck as he searches for her, and she learns later that he committed suicide after losing his fortune in 1929.
Her story complete, Rose goes alone to the stern of Lovett's ship. There she takes out the Heart of the Ocean, which has in fact been in her possession all along, and drops it into the ocean. While seemingly asleep in her bed, the photos on her dresser are a visual chronicle that she lived a free life inspired by Jack. The young Rose is then seen reuniting with Jack at the Grand Staircase of the Titanic, cheered and congratulated by those who perished on the ship.

James Cameron had a fascination with shipwrecks, and, for him, the RMS Titanic was "the Mount Everest of shipwrecks." He was almost past the point in his life when he felt he could consider an undersea expedition, but said he still had "a mental restlessness" to live the life he had turned away from when he switched from the sciences to the arts in college. So when an IMAX film was made from footage shot of the wreck itself, he decided to seek Hollywood funding to "pay for an expedition and do the same thing." It was "not because I particularly wanted to make the movie," Cameron said. "I wanted to dive to the shipwreck."
Cameron wrote a scriptment for a Titanic film, met with 20th Century Fox executives including Peter Chernin, and pitched it as "Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic". There was a tense pause and Cameron said, "Also, fellas, it's a period piece, it's going to cost $150,000,000 and there's not going to be a sequel.... They were like, 'Oooooohkaaaaaay – a three-hour romantic epic? Sure, that's just what we want. Is there a little bit of Terminator in that? Any Harrier jets, shoot-outs, or car chases?' I said, 'No, no, no. It's not like that.'" The studio was dubious about the idea's commercial prospects, but, hoping for a long term relationship with Cameron, they gave him a greenlight.Cameron convinced Fox to promote the film based on the publicity afforded by shooting the Titanic wreck itself, and organized several dives to the site over a period of two years."My pitch on that had to be a little more detailed," said Cameron. "So I said, ‘Look, we’ve got to do this whole opening where they’re exploring the Titanic and they find the diamond, so we’re going to have all these shots of the ship." Cameron stated, "Now, we can either do them with elaborate models and motion control shots and CG and all that, which will cost X amount of money – or we can spend X plus 30 per cent and actually go shoot it at the real wreck." The crew shot at the real wreck in the Atlantic Ocean eleven times in 1995 and actually spent more time with the ship than its passengers. At that depth, with a water pressure of 6,000 pounds per square inch, "one small flaw in the vessel's superstructure would mean instant death for all on board." Not only were the dives high-risk, but adverse conditions prevented Cameron from getting the high quality footage that he wanted.
Descending to the actual site made both Cameron and crew want "to live up to that level of reality.... But there was another level of reaction coming away from the real wreck, which was that it wasn't just a story, it wasn't just a drama," he said. "It was an event that happened to real people who really died. Working around the wreck for so much time, you get such a strong sense of the profound sadness and injustice of it, and the message of it." Cameron stated, "You think, 'There probably aren't going to be many filmmakers who go to Titanic. There may never be another one – maybe a documentarian." Due to this, he felt "a great mantle of responsibility to convey the emotional message of it – to do that part of it right, too".
After filming the underwater shots, Cameron began writing the screenplay. He wanted to honor the people who died during the sinking, so he spent six months researching all of the Titanic's crew and passengers. "I read everything I could. I created an extremely detailed timeline of the ship’s few days and a very detailed timeline of the last night of its life," he said. "And I worked within that to write the script, and I got some historical experts to analyze what I’d written and comment on it, and I adjusted it." He paid meticulous attention to detail, even including a scene depicting the Californian's role in Titanic's demise, though this was later cut (see below). From the beginning of the shoot, they had "a very clear picture" of what happened on the ship that night. "I had a library that filled one whole wall of my writing office with "Titanic stuff," because I wanted it to be right, especially if we were going to dive to the ship," he said. "That set the bar higher in a way – it elevated the movie in a sense. We wanted this to be a definitive visualization of this moment in history as if you’d gone back in a time machine and shot it."
Cameron felt the Titanic sinking was "like a great novel that really happened", yet the event had become a mere morality tale; the film would give audiences the experience of living the history. The treasure hunter Brock Lovett represented those who never connected with the human element of the tragedy, while the blossoming romance of Jack and Rose, he believed, would be the most engaging part of the story: when their love is finally destroyed, the audience would mourn the loss. "All my films are love stories," Cameron said, "but in Titanic I finally got the balance right. It's not a disaster film. It's a love story with a fastidious overlay of real history." Cameron then framed the romance with the elderly Rose to make the intervening years palpable and poignant. For him, the end of the film leaves open the question if the elderly Rose was in a conscious dream or had died in her sleep.