Titanic is back in cinemas on 10 February — watch it / weep over it / warble that Celine Dion song — but try not to get involved in any interminable arguments about whether Jack really could have fitted on that door next to Rose.
1997: New Labour enjoyed a landslide in the General Election, the Spice Girls were No.1 and the UK won the Eurovision Song Contest. Britannia ruled! But not the waves, as we realised when Titanic came out.
I may have only seen Titanic twice in the cinema in ’97 (I know, slacker!) but I have watched it umpteen times at home since, mainly when I want to ugly cry over the “band played on” scene, where bandmaster Wallace Hartley tells his musicians to stop playing on deck and go save themselves. The others leave with their instruments, while their boss takes up his violin and plays on. One by one the rest of his players return and play (to their doom).
But the big screen is really where it belongs (I well remember the collective “Ouch!” watching it in the cinema as an extra fell off the “top” of the up-ended ship, bouncing his way down to the icy water — that’s the kind of bonding experience they mean by the magic of cinema).
Here’s the synopsis (yes, really):
An epic, action-packed romance set against the ill-fated maiden voyage of the “unsinkable” Titanic, at the time, the largest moving object ever built.
Titanic won a record 11 Academy Awards® including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Art Direction-Set Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects. Upon its initial release in 1997, the film became the #1 all-time global box office champ and is currently the third highest grossing film worldwide.
Here’s the trailer — scroll down for images from the film:
Titanic re-release — images
Leave a Reply