A one-time Stanley Kramer project before he jumped ship after a couple of weeks' filming, Raise the Titanic is one of those films that isn't really that bad, it just isn't much good. It handles the exposition and setup briskly and efficiently and the raising of the wreck genuinely spectacularly, but everything inbetween is just tedious and undramatic. A huge problem is the decision to drop the parallel narrative from the book: where the film only concentrates on the modern-day story, which means lots of looking at sonar screens while mini-subs float around in the darkest depths of the ocean for almost as long as it took the ship to sink, the book livened things up with the ship's maiden voyage and sinking as well. The end result is by the rules storytelling that keeps everything under two hours, but which keeps everything pretty flat as well. Still, it has its moments - Alec Guinness' cameo, Richard Jordan wandering through the ghostly skeleton of the Titanic's ballroom, the sequence of the raised Titanic sailing into New York past the Twin Towers inadvertently linking the first great civilian tragedy of the 20th century with the first great civilian tragedy of the 21st - and has a very nice score by John Barry.
Sadly, while the film looks good in its original Scope ratio, Carlton's UK DVD is cropped to 1.85:1 - for the full 2.35:1 widescreen version you need to track down either the Australian or Swedish PAL DVDs. |
Raise the Titanic [Region 2] dvd movie.![Raise the Titanic [Region 2]](/pictures/Raise-Titanic-x.jpg)