Why James Cameron's Titanic Hasn't Aged In 25 Years

Pick up, you s

Is there anyone there? Yes, what do you see? Iceberg right ahead

Movies are a special medium in how they can tell ordinary stories in an extraordinary way

From powerhouse performances to scores that impact us on a deeply emotional level, every moving piece

is a part of a whole. For Titanic, filmmaker James Cameron used over an hour of carefully crafted stunt work

and set design to tell the story of ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance

Being one of the highest-grossing movies of all time on the cusp of its 25th anniversary

Titanic doesn't need a whole lot of context. Written and directed by James Cameron and released in 1997

Titanic went on to gross over $2.2 billion. The story focused on Rose DeWitt Bucator

played by Kate Winslet, a teenager forced into engagement to preserve her family's wealth

who falls in love with a young lower-class artist named Jack Dawson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio

Even before the film's release, the word Titanic had already become synonymous with abject failure, hubris, and shipwrecks

We as an audience knew going in how this movie was going to end. The ship will sink

But the reason people still flocked in droves was Cameron's penchant for entangling emotions with high-level spectacle

In a lot of filmmakers' hands, the sinking of the Titanic, with its frenzied shots, quick asides, and myriad of characters, would be disorienting

But working with stunt coordinator Simon Crane and visual effects supervisor Mark Lassoff

they were able to make a movie that not only awed you with its attention to detail

but told quick, concise stories about the ordinary people aboard the ship

In order to do that, Cameron constructed a near-life-size replica of the Titanic

much of it made from rubber to protect the performers and a water tank to contain it

The tank alone cost $40 million, and there are countless miniatures, hydraulics to tilt each

half of the ship, extras with rollers attached to their clothing so they could slide more easily and on and on While it impossible to practically recreate a crash of that magnitude Cameron shares a trait with most gifted directors an ability to get creative with their problem

When filming the sinking, the bow of the ship was able to tilt 6 degrees, with the stern able to

tilt up to about 180 degrees. Cameron cleverly used Dutch angles, turning the camera on its roll

axis, then composited in a waterline to give the illusion of sharper angles that gave the feeling

of sinking. All of this helped the performers really sell the feeling of weightlessness on

screen. As opposed to the famous clip of Batman and Robin scaling the building wall, we immediately

fear for the people as they dangle and hold tight for survival. It's not impossible to watch behind

the scenes footage and think of classic Hong Kong wire work. But instead of the almost ethereal

floating sensations of those films, the stunt team imbues weight and impact. As the carnage carries

on, we get brief snippets of various passengers and crew dealing with the inevitability laid out

before them. It's here we start to get flashes of Cameron's strongest suit, his empathy and

adoration of love stories. Much has already been said about the Titanic being a love story first

and the examination of one of nautical history's greatest disasters second. Cameron himself stated

he pitched the movie as Romeo and Juliet on a shipwreck. Cameron's entire filmography is filled

with love stories, from two people fighting desperately to rekindle their marriage in True

Lies to the time travel inevitability of true love in Terminator. There are so many threads in

everything he creates that tries desperately to understand the most basic of human emotions

That fixation is the perfect complement to his technical ability and curiosity. In order to make

those small moments work, Cameron knows he has to give us something visually appealing. Which brings

us to Captain Edward John Smith, played by Bernard Hill and based on his real-life counterpart

Captain Smith was well-liked amongst the upper class and was for all intents and purposes an

accomplished seafarer on his literal last voyage. Cameron avoids any sort of blame game, most of

which had all been debunked after the real sinking Instead what we presented with is one of Cameron most striking visual moments Cameron is an accomplished visual artist himself

It's, in fact, his hand drawing Kate Winslet like the proverbial French girl

He's an artist who has an inner understanding of composition through his lens

As the ocean water begins to bend the windows to its whims, Captain Smith holds fast to the ship's wheel

When the water crushes through and begins to envelop Smith, Cameron has the actor crowd over the wheel

His shoulders slightly rise, the water high above him. A sense of inevitability and acceptance

in just a few brief seconds of film. Moments like that litter the back half of Titanic

Impressionistic paintings that make the viewer take a breath and reckon with what's happening

Down in the boiler room as two men struggle to shut a door, we watch them thrash relentlessly

against the face of a rushing tide. It's these small moments where we can't help but wonder

if they'll make it and make us forget that we already know the answer. Cameron doesn't give us just moments of defeat, though

He elegantly moves back and forth between spectacle and emotion. As the ship's band famously plays, water begins to surround them

Their dedication feels like a victory. It's the same when we watch an elderly couple lie together

just like we presume they always have. Then there are moments that seem to perfectly marry his visual storytelling

and tendency to push the technical envelope. In an article with Before and Afters for Titanic's 20th anniversary

key animator Andy Jones recalled animating the now infamous Propeller Man. After Cameron told him the shot fell off, Jones stated he wanted me to double-check the math on it

I assured him that the distance and rate of speed the figure was falling was correct

He then asked me to double the distance he falls from after hitting the propeller to the water

It's that simple understanding that something was off-kilter, so the logic needed to be slightly bent, that bears much of Titanic's weight

That inclination more than likely comes from Cameron's understanding of horror and thriller tropes

The Terminator is widely considered a slasher movie, and while Aliens was much more action than Haunted House in Space there are still moments of terror There a reason comedy and horror have so much in common and it often attributed to its reliance on timing And timing is something Cameron clearly understands When one man falls from the ship and clips off a table there a hurried acceleration

in his spin, one that probably isn't too realistic, but as Cameron insisted with the propeller

it felt harder. In a more literal usage of timing, it's been found that if you count only the time

spent on the ship and not the present-day scenes. The over three-hour runtime clocks in at two hours

and 40 minutes, which is the time most believe it took the actual ship to sink. That level of

attention to detail just adds to the overall feeling of immersion that Titanic still carries

There are meticulously crafted interiors and props, the usage of practical effects and stunt

work married to breakthrough CGI. There's a real-world tangibility that gives us an emotional

link his later work with the Avatar franchise sometimes lacks. And that's not to say that those

movies are lesser by any means, only that there's a dissonance between real people acting in frame

on set, and motion-captured actors in a computer-generated world. The technical prowess

is groundbreaking and changing what stories can be told, but it's important to remember that there

was a moment in 1997 where Cameron perfected how to make a blockbuster. It's this melding of

Cameron's obsessions, his steadfastness on creating a feeling that makes the stunts of Titanic stay with

us a quarter of a century after its release. Otherwise, the entire thing would come across

as either cold and technical or completely voyeuristic. Hollywood has a long history with

disaster movies, and as an audience, we love to watch conflict. Most often, that's an antagonist

and protagonist going head-to-head over conflicting ideals. But what better antagonist than nature

or our own hubris, and what better conflicting ideal than our want to live and love

Movies like Titanic don't carry on because they're impressive. They stay with us because they gave us a feeling

Part of that feeling comes from us being able to relate, and a large part of that relatability is thanks to the hard-working stunt performers and crew

who showed us what humanity really can accomplish in the face of disaster