I have written two plays for my kids to perform based on the sinking of the Titanic, surely a strange parenting technique, and have been interested in the doomed liner most of my life. One of the plays will be performed this weekend, so if you are near Biola, you can get my take on what the sinking of Titanic meant.
For the rest of the cosmos, including the better looking, better educated, and more socially aware that will not condescend to see me cling to my outmoded religion due to economic bitterness by writing a play about the Titanic, there are the movies.
There are three “big” movies about Titanic. The one that will be easy to get, unadjusted for inflation it is the biggest blockbuster of all time, is the worst. What is good about it comes from the story of Titanic or is borrowed from other films. What is bad about it, is so bad that it still amazes me that people saw it multiple times.
Here are my impressions of the films from worst to first.
Titanic (1997):
It should have bombed. People thought it would bomb.
However, the story of the doomed liner is powerful enough that it was easy not to notice that the romantic story is trivial (on the largest object built by mankind in history to that point, full of beautiful spots, “making love” takes place in the back of a car stored on the ship!) and the acting worse.
The movie is sometimes praised for its realism and certainly got the “look” right by essentially rebuilding half the ship, though the computerized portions are laughable and serve as a warning to filmmakers who now rely on them. The recreation of Titanic using real metal, wood, and objects is immortal. The computer generated graphics are painful.
What is utterly unrealistic in the movie is the way people behave. If you want to see Clinton era morality combined with weirdly Marxist economic views and no idea whatsoever of the way “lower class” people behaved 1912, watch this film. Arab and Irish immigrants on the ship (guess which group gets the most film face time in this culturally “sensitive” movie?) were clinging to Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic faith, but the film misses their morality, their passion, and them. In a film criticized by some for playing up bad treatment of steerage passengers, the film actually attacks everything most people in steerage believed about love, marriage, and culture.
This film honors a man they would have despised.
If you were a teenage girl in the nineties (so long ago!), then you might feel about this film the way our mothers thought about Love Story which is another foolish and unwatchable movie with lucky box office. You may think me cold and cruel, but take care. I love romance enough to try to save you from destroying romantic, even unrealistic, memories of your “depth” in the nineties. If you watch the film now, all illusions about yourself will be destroyed. Don’t do it.
This was a bad movie that hit a “perfect moment” that will never exist again. Do not try to recapture it by watching the film with your wiser adult eyes.
It will ruin your memories.
Heed the lesson of the unwise mothers who turn to Love Story now that it is on cable television. These sad mothers cannot actually watch Love Story now without knowing they are old and once were foolish. I watched it last year and laughed harder than I have through many recent comedies.
You have been warned.
The second film is much, much better. Titanic (1953) uses story telling and intelligent camera work rather than big special effects. The acting is much better than the other film with the same title and more fame.
The moral message is essentially the opposite of the other epic. People who knew what their parents and grandparents felt about Titanic made this movie. In that sense, it is more realistic emotionally to what they felt than the big box office nineties film. It clings to notions about God, family, and marriage, but it (somehow!) does so without a trace of bitterness. It is not a great movie, but it is a satisfying one.
If you have no sympathy for Christian morality, get this film and try to understand why another generation believed about evil, morality, and Providence.
(If I had seen this film before writing my first play on Titanic, I would not have bothered. It was the answer to the other film.)
The best of three films is A Night to Remember.
This film is actually about Titanic as opposed to a focus on a fictional back story. It is well written and since the truth is compelling, the film works. Hollywood often tarts up a great story (see most Biblical epics) and so misses what made the original history so gripping. We spend time with Ben Hur we could have spent with Jesus.
On the other hand, a “just the facts” film that is not a documentary can be confusing and lack an emotional center. The film writers avoided this problem by finding a well written book on the doomed liner to keep the details in check and tell the story with heart.
Though the book on which the movie was based is dated in some places factually by the discovery of the liner on the bottom of the Atlantic, A Night to Remember (the book) the most readable introduction to Titanic fascination. Read Walter Lord’s tome by all means.
Watching (mostly) true life stories play out in real time (the sinking is done almost minute to minute) with competent actors staying out of the way of the unwinding story builds tension very effectively. This film is a slow starter that trusts the audience to know what is coming. By the end, it is heart breaking. It also was made near enough in time to capture what the people of the era felt about the loss of the great liner.
This film feels emotionally true, not manipulative.
The best documentary I have seen on the liner was done by A and E (the best network ever?). It is still fairly up to date (we keep learning more from the wreck every year) and is more likely to bring tears to my eyes than any of the films on repeat watching.
The Titanic still moves me, because it is the story of doomed splendor. Souls created in the image of God create, as they must, something splendid: the great ship. There is much to love and admire about the achievement, but all is spoiled by hubris. The ship, like so many of the lovely people, is doomed.
Salvation comes, unexpectedly, to those who embrace duty and this painful truth.