Plot:
In his search for a blue diamond once owned by Louis XVI that was believed to have gone down with the Titanic, Brock Lovett discovers an intriguing sketch of a beautiful woman wearing the diamond on her neck. When the sketch appears on a news program, an old lady steps forward, claiming to be the woman in the drawing. She then recounts a beautiful story that took place on the ill-fated ship, a story of love that knew no boundaries. - Phil Fernando

Comment:
The most expensive movie to date, long awaited, highly advertised, 14 academy awards nominations, big success at the box office... my fear was that this was only hype and that the movie was just an unlikely love story surrounded by a lot of special effects! Fortunately, this is not the case and Titanic deserves the success it is having.

The story starts in the present days when various researchers are doing submarine explorations in the relic of the Titanic. A 102 years old woman who survived to the Titanic sink joins them and starts narrating the intense love story she experienced during the few days before the disaster. So, after some suggestive underwater shots and through a few nice camera cuts, the action goes back in 1912 and the wonderful experience on board of the famous ship begins.

Director James Cameron does know how to make an excellent movie and clearly doesn't care about the expenses! The shots of the Titanic both external and internal are impressive, today's technology can produce terribly good results when used with intelligence and reason, something that doesn't always happen as shown in some movies released earlier this year (which I prefer not to mention here... just think about dinosaurs and comic superheroes...). The 360-degrees flyovers, the sinking ship breaking up into two halves, the iceberg, the inundated rooms, everything looked perfectly real and credible.

Also the actors were pretty good and managed to create a good parallelism between the big disaster of the ship with their own personal adversities and troubles. I'm not so sure that Leonardo DiCaprio is completely believable as a poor artist who manages to jump on the Titanic by winning a poker hand... Despite this, he does an admirable performance especially when coupled with Kate Winslet.

While this movie is not supposed to be a valid historical description of what happened on the Titanic, it seems to be quite accurate about the events and also portraits some of the well known dramatic episodes such as Mr. Guggenheim refusing to wear the life jacket and accepting death like a gentlemen or the band playing until the very end. There are various touching moments during the sinking and even the finale is great with the elegant parade of the death people.

Although the movie is over 3 hours long, it definitely grabbed all my interest and attention for all its duration, there are almost no moments in which the story takes on water! Admittedly, I started feeling that the plot was heading badly during the few chases and escapes through the inundated stairs and lobbies but these scenes didn't last for so long and they were always filmed with good style and rhythm.