The RMS Titanic  was of great interest to me when I was a kid (Still is today). 100 years.....it used to be 65 years when I first started to read about it!

Forty years. That doesn't seem a very long time at all, any more!

••

I guess that's not really as incomprehensible as we'd like it to be. The sinking of the Titanic was a long time ago, and it has even slipped from the realms of metaphor in recent decades.

When I was growing up, and, indeed, for much of the 20th Century, there was a kind of "cultural awareness" of the Titanic. But even ocean liners are largely a thing of the past now. They exist in diminshed (if bloated) form as cruise ships, presenting an entirely different experience -- and not much chance for metaphors!

+++

I wouldn't have minded Cameron's movie so much if he didn't invent 2 fictional characters for his story where I'm sure he could have found a real couple that was on the ship with a story that was more interesting than what he came up with. Making those fictional characters playing a role in the Titanic's sinking was the straw that broke the camel's back, though.

••

Exactly my reason for shunning the movie.

History is a great stage upon which to play fictional drama. World War Two, for instance, is vast enough that we can slip a few made-up characters and stories into it, and do no damage. Perhaps we can even expand our understanding of some historical events by viewing them thru fictional eyes.

But the sinking of the Titantic is too "small", too intimate, too personal. It's a story that should not be fictionalized -- especially not to tell a sappy love story that has nothing to do with the real world drama into which it is thrust.

••

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER is the one I showed my then girlfriend, a decade or so back. She was enamored of the Cameron movie, so I said "Let me show you the REAL one!"

She was shocked when, twenty minutes in, the boat hit the berg.

"Of course," I said. "This movie is about the sinking of the Titanic, not some crappy love story!"

(The one thing the Cameron movie gets right, that others have not, is that the ship broke in half. This was reported at the time, but it seems it was simply "too much" for the sensibilities of a pre-WW1 world. The reports, including drawings, were rejected. People preferred to imagine the Grand Dame slipping beneath the waves in one piece.

(Truth to tell, there are times I wish the wreck had not been discovered, either. The myth was that she was lying in one piece on the bottom, perfectly preserved. It was imagined that the cold at that depth would even have preserved the bodies still aboard. And, too, there was a legend that no rusting would have occurred as long as she STAYED wet. Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel IMPERIAL EARTH, touched on this, with the Titanic completing her journey to New York, having been raised -- in on piece -- and enclosed in a nitrogen filled balloon, which would allow her to dry out without rusting.)

Titanic for me is a film of two parts. the part up to the iceberg which I can ignore and the part after the iceberg which I feel is a text book study in to sinking a boat.

Kate and Leonardo I can do without

Titanic for me is a film of two parts. the part up to the iceberg which I can ignore and the part after the iceberg which I feel is a text book study in to sinking a boat.

Kate and Leonardo I can do without

------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------

I completely agree!

I always want to fast forward to the part they hit the iceberg and go from there. The visuals are great btw!