Film After 11 Podcast | Titanic (1997)

As the Film After 11 podcast hits the letter “T” in this year’s alphabetical marathon, my son Joseph specially requested a visit to Titanic, James Cameron’s monster blockbuster hit about the most famous shipwreck of all time. I was a little shocked that he wanted to watch a three-and-a-quarter-hour movie and expected him to get antsy long before the end, but he sat through the whole film, only pausing once for a bathroom break. I wish I’d had that option when I saw this thing in the theater three decades ago.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Titanic. Eleven Oscar wins or not, I’ve never felt it was one of the director’s better films. On the one hand, I certainly can’t deny the astounding scale and scope of the spectacle James Cameron puts on display. The last half of it is an amazing thrill ride, rarely topped in cinema. Unfortunately, I can’t pretend to care about the Jack and Rose romance at the center of it all, which has always struck me as a cynical marketing ploy to get teenage girls to come back to the theater over and over again. If you really want to make a romantic drama about two young people in love, you simply don’t hire the director of The Terminator to do that. Perhaps this should have been co-directed, with Cameron for the action and someone with a subtler touch for the drama?

And I’m sorry, but yeah, that door definitely had enough room for two people if Rose had scooched over a little. Turns out she’s just as selfish and entitled at the end of the story as she was at the beginning.

Titanic (1997) - The Infamous Door
Title:Titanic
Year of Release: 1997
Director: James Cameron
Watched On:Blu-ray
Available On: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Blu-ray 3D
Paramount+
Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

The Blu-ray

Titanic was a co-production between Paramount and 20th Century Fox. Paramount got distribution rights for the American market while Fox took them for overseas. In the United States, Paramount brought the film to Blu-ray in 2012 and to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in 2023. Because the latter is one of James Cameron’s controversial A.I. upscales, I’ve thus far decided to forego it and stick with the Blu-ray.

To that end, what I own is the supposedly “Limited Edition” 4-disc set that contains both the original 2D version of the movie and a 3D conversion approved by James Cameron. The 3D version was transferred in open-matte full-screen 16:9 per Cameron’s wishes, and is split across two discs due to the greater amount of data required for 3D on a movie of this length. Meanwhile, the 2D version retains the original 2.35:1 theatrical composition and manages to squeeze all onto one disc. The final disc in the set is devoted to bonus features.

For this viewing, Joseph and I watched only the 2D version of the movie. Frankly, I have little interest in the 3D at all and am not sure why I ever bought it, except as a curiosity.

Right from the start, the 2.35:1 image on the 2D disc is so sharp, so detailed, and so vibrant that I’m left questioning why a 4K copy would even be needed. For the most part, colors are strong (we’ll come back to that momentarily*) and contrast is rich. For Blu-ray, this is one of those often-desired “reference quality” discs. Honestly, it looks better than most 4K I’ve seen.

It was well publicized at the time of the Blu-ray’s release that Cameron had digitally modified some of the nighttime skies due to petty nit-picking from astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse-Tyson about the stars not being in the right positions. I feel pretty confident that he also tweaked some of the other CGI visual effects to improve them over what they looked like in 1997. I remember watching this movie in the theater and laughing at how bad one particular sweeping overhead shot looked with little digital stick figures walking around on the ship’s deck like something out of Dire Straits’ old “Money for Nothing” music video. That scene doesn’t look nearly as distracting here. I doubt my son noticed anything weird or wrong about it.

Titanic (1997) - Teal ColoringTitanic (1997) - Orange Coloring
Titanic (1997) – Teal (left) and orange (right) coloring

*On the subject of colors, however, this is of course another of Cameron’s teal-and-orange makeover jobs. Teal lighting or water in some scenes, and glowing orange skin tones in others, dominate way too much of the color scheme. Given that the 4K edition is upscaled from the same master, and that all of Cameron’s other 4K upscales are authored with standard color gamut and dynamic range inside HDR containers, I wouldn’t expect that version to change these characteristics at all.

The one thing I do expect the 4K version to change, unfortunately, is to strip any remaining trace of grain out of the picture so it will look like the movie was photographed with modern digital cameras. That’s been the director’s M.O. in recent days. I’d rather not have that. Grain here is already light in the first place, adding a subtle texture to the image.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is a stunner. Plenty of immersive directional effects fill the room with sounds of the ship groaning as it falls apart. Bass is deep and powerful.

Titanic (1997) Blu-ray + 3D

The 2D disc for the feature offers three audio commentaries, all recorded for a DVD release back in 2005. James Cameron does one, the cast and crew another, and the last is a “Historical Commentary” by Titanic researcher Don Lynch and artist Ken Marschall.

The Bonus Features disc then houses two documentaries, lots of deleted scenes with optional Cameron commentary, a Celine Dion music video, a bunch of trailers, TV spots, still galleries, and so on. The disc case then promises “60 Behind-the-Scenes Featurettes,” which sounds incredible until you discover that almost all of them are one minute or less in length. The content is still substantial and much of it worthwhile (perhaps not that music video), but the marketing bullet-points overplay it more than a little.

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