Pros: A boat trip down memory lane. But with turbo engines.
Cons: If it didn’t float your boat (sorry) first time around, there’s nothing new here for you.
Colossal. Herculean. Gargantuan. If you look up titanic in a thesaurus, you’ll discover larger-than-life adjectives. And that’s just what Titanic is: a monumental beast of a film. Could there be a better candidate for the 3D treatment?
But Cameron’s tackling a conversion job (because the film was shot in 2D). And we’ve seen it all before. The boat sinks. No danger of spoilers, then. So, the question is, could the $18 million dollar budget have been better spent on pioneering new scripts?
Probably. But this is the grande dame of cinema, and there’s a case for justifying her encore. The hailstones of ice and cascading water flourish with the effects. But the most heartfelt difference 3D makes is to the overall depth and scale.
The story does the same heart-wrenching job as before. Watching legendary scenes, like Leo sketching Kate in the nude, are reminiscently titillating. Rose tosses Jack a coin, and says that as a paying customer she expects to get what she wants. As paying customers ourselves, we too are expecting. And what we want is served up plentifully.
This re-release isn’t a lifejacket for the 3D industry, but a reminder that our relationship with cinema is founded on emotion, and not effects.
The older Rose is looking back nostalgically. And, as viewers of this 1997 stalwart, so are we. The audiences will come flooding back with as much gusto as the spanking new 3D torrents of water. In our world, Cal Hockley was right, ‘God himself could not sink this ship’.
Released: 6th April 2012
By Natasha Lunn
Twitter @natashalunn
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