Titanic

“I’ll never let go.” It’s difficult to pinpoint a tragedy as memorable and misunderstood as the sinking of Titanic. An event which killed 1500 people in the span of 2-3 hours and only 700 remained. There’s hundreds of stories of humanity and triumph which emerged from sinking, but instead of adapting any singular story, Cameron uses it to tell a story about what Titanic is REALLY about. Tragedy. He uses it as a backdrop to tell a story of love and loss which is emblematic of what took place that very night, and it’s one of the greatest love stories ever told. He asks us to not get lost in the cold hard facts and truths of the night and treating each life as a statistic, but to acknowledge that was took place was an unbearable tragedy. Jack and Rose may not have been real, but the ship was full of hundreds of people just like them, and if you can feel that deeply for these two, you can feel it for all lives lost in the Atlantic Ocean on April 14th, 1912.  Titanic is also a technical masterpiece of which nothing has replicated, using massive sets and essentially rebuilding Titanic, it’s truly one of the greatest sets in the history of cinema. Expertly blends CGI and real, tangible set pieces to remind the audience that this HAPPENED. Real people lost their lives.  Does it make some mistakes? Of course it does. Some facts that we thought knew about Titanic have since been disproven in the years past this film, but does it REALLY matter? No. Not at all. The only thing that matters, as this film tells us, is love and our own memory.