By now, you’ve probably been exposed to a lot of conflicting opinions on James Cameron’s Avatar. You've probably read more than a few rave reviews and a fair number of less than flattering ones. You may even have friends divided along those same lines. This writer, for example, loved the film and totally bought into the entire spectacle and thoroughly enjoyed the film (heck, no one does an action movie quite like Cameron), whereas our resident film critic had quite a different take on the film and thought it a pretty yet horribly written and shallow piece (of course, I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea). No one seems willing to deny that it is, as Todd McCarthy stated in Variety (December 2009), the “most expensive and technically ambitious film ever made.” It’s just that people either embrace the experience or find it hollow and devoid of any real depth, character, or lasting worth. But, this isn’t the first time that a divide such as this has plagued one of Cameron’s films.

That James Cameron would make Titanic was inevitable, since the director of such blockbusters as Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, and, now Avatar once likened filmmaking to creating "spectacles," and what spectacle has proven costlier, grander, or more popular than Titanic? Even Avatar, with its own enormous budget didn’t come close to producing the headaches for studios that Titanic did. To put it bluntly, everyone knew what they were getting into this time around. It's also appropriate that, at the time of Titanic’s release, Cameron's career culminated with the biggest cinematic spectacle he (or anyone else for that matter) had yet created (at least until he outdid his own self with Avatar). Indeed, Titanic brought in an overwhelming worldwide box office of $1.8 billion (a total that grew exponentially when added with the $30 million television sale, $400 million for the over 25 million copies of the soundtrack that were sold; and somewhere around $700 million in global video sales when all is said and done). The unequaled box-office success Titanic enjoyed in addition to the critical praise heaped upon it (remember, it tied All About Eve with a record 14 Academy Award nominations and consequently went on to win an impressive 11 awards (another record) including Best Picture and Best Director – tying Ben-Hur) transformed Titanic into something more than a mere movie, it became a cultural phenomenon. Given its tremendous financial success, along with a recent Golden Globe win for best film, Avatar seems poised to make a name for itself during awards season (though more than likely nowhere near the scope of its predecessor).

The production story of Titanic (an epic on par with the film itself) began when Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage of the ship in 1985 on the ocean floor 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Upon seeing the National Geographic documentary on the discovery, Cameron came up with the following story idea: "Do story with bookends of present-day [wreckage] scene … intercut with memory of a survivor … needs a mystery or driving plot element." Then, in early 1995, Cameron made the initial pitch to studio executives. A pitch which was reluctantly accepted based on the director's track record of profitability as well as the fact that he was insisting that the film could be made for less than $100 million. In late 1995, as a precursor to the start of formal production, Cameron made 12 two-and-a-half mile descents to the Titanic wreckage site where he used a specifically designed 35mm camera to obtain footage for the bookend sections of the film. Armed with this footage, Cameron convinced the studio to back the film wholeheartedly.

After the project was officially greenlit in May 1996, ground was broken on a studio in Rosarito Beach in Baja California, since it had been determined some months prior that no one studio in the world could provide the facilities needed for the mammoth project. This custom-built studio featured a 17-million gallon exterior shooting tank (the largest in the world) which housed the 775 foot-long, 90% to scale replica of the Titanic; a five-million gallon interior tank housed on a 32,000 sq. ft. soundstage; three other stages; production offices; set/prop storage; a grip/electric building; welding/fabrication workshops; dressing rooms; and support structures.

As you may already know (and hopefully you do as there are several spoilers ahead), Titanic tells the fictional story of two class-crossed lovers who meet aboard the disaster-bound ship, fall in love, and then struggle to survive the grizzly sinking all within the context of a true-to-detail retelling of the actual disaster. This story within the film is launched from the present-day via a subplot that revolves around a missing diamond (the completely bogus "Heart of the Ocean"). After treasure-hunter-for-hire Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) finds a drawing of a naked young woman wearing the elusive diamond and features it in a television program on which he is appearing, an elderly woman (Gloria Stuart as a 101-year-old Rose) comes forward claiming to be the woman in the picture. After being whisked to the Titanic wreck site, Rose proceeds to recount the story of Titanic's fateful voyage. It is here that a slew of stock characters are introduced: Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the American, free-spirit archetype from the wrong side of the tracks; Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) a beautiful Philadelphia socialite who has no control over the course of her life; "Cal" Hockley (Billy Zane), Rose's oppressive husband-to-be who sees her as nothing more than a possession; and Rose's domineering mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher) who views Rose's marriage to Cal as vital to the family's survival and Rose's burgeoning romance with Jack as a threat to her current way of life.

The romance between Jack and Rose begins when he thwarts her attempted suicide and infiltrates her first-class lifestyle. Slowly, Jack entices Rose to let go and to, as the film ensures we remember, "make it count." Their relationship culminates in the creation of the aforementioned drawing and a torrid bit of lovemaking. Titanic then hits an iceberg and the film shifts from romance to an action-adventure. The final act of the film concentrates on the sinking of the ship and Rose and Jack's quest for survival. After some of the greatest special effects ever put on film, Titanic sinks and Rose is left atop a piece of wood while Jack floats nearby slowly freezing to death. While they wait for rescue, Jack makes Rose promise that she "won't give up, no matter what happens, no matter how hopeless." After being rescued and reaching America, Rose takes the name of Dawson and lives the life she promised Jack that she would. The film then bounces back to the present day salvage ship to deliver the film's coda, wherein Lovett declares that although he's been searching for Titanic, he never really "got it." Later that evening, Rose makes her way to the deck of the ship and drops the "Heart of the Ocean" necklace into the sea. Rose dies peacefully in her sleep ("an old lady warm in her bed," just as Jack had predicted) later that night surrounded by the photographic memories of the life she had thanks to Jack. Upon her death, she is transported back to Titanic (presumably her entrance to the afterlife) and reunited with Jack, as well as all of those who died aboard the ship, at the grand staircase (where the clock reads 2:20 – the time of Titanic's sinking). She appears in this sequence as her 17-year-old self, suggesting that this is, as Dave Kehr suggested in the New York Daily News (February 6, 1998), "the time it will always be: [both] the beginning of her life and its end."

Before addressing the critical worth of Titanic, it is important to discuss the nature of its immense popularity. Perhaps the weakest explanation for Titanic's popularity would lie in an offhand comment by Cameron himself wherein he referred to the film as nothing more than a "$190 million chick flick." Although it is true that scores of women (mostly teenage girls) flocked to see this movie during its initial release less for the special effects or sensational movie making than for the charismatic DiCaprio and the way he swept Winslet off her feet, to categorize the entire film as a so-called "chick-flick" does it a disservice. Instead, the appeal of Titanic exists in the relationship the audience has with the story of the film itself. That is, the film functions almost as a parable for the American Dream and the American way of life.

The core of the film is an epic romance. Cameron has long said that this was the "great love story" he thought The Abyss should have been. While the love angle appears to be the heart of the film it is, however, the anachronistic characters of Jack and Rose that make the film so appealing to today's audiences. These two characters serve, as Peter N. Chumo has noted in the Journal of Popular Film and Television (Winter 1999), as the "audience's surrogates." That is, neither character is really correct for the time period of the film, they are more like modern interpretations of a princess and a young rogue. Yet they are more than mere stereotypes. Both characters are archetypes of the American consciousness: Rose being the enlightened woman of the 20th century and Jack being the adventurous American male. The way these modern characters function within the time-frame of the film is what endears them to the audience and is also what makes the film more a morality lesson than a retelling of history. It is for this reason, as Mike Pence has pointed out in the Saturday Evening Post (May 1999), that "what draws us to this film is an undeniable sense that we are seeing America of the late 20th century in metaphor before our eyes."

The critical reception Titanic received was for the most part positive, but there was a faction that detested the film and it is this that causes the film's critical worth to be questioned even today after all of its success and accolades. Much of the post-Oscar lambasting of Titanic can be traced to the backlash over the snub of L.A. Confidential in favor of Titanic in the categories of Best Picture and Best Director. The general opinion was that Oscar voters felt that if they didn't go along with the popular opinion then they would be subject to profound criticism. So, when the big box-office winner also won the two biggest awards, the assumption was that the Academy had been taken in by the hype and had been swayed by public sentiment. But, this is a very close-minded argument when one considers for a moment that Titanic was actually a pretty darn good movie. Curtis Hanson (the director of L.A. Confidential) elaborated on this very point when he stated, "As Frank Capra said, don't make your best movie the year somebody else makes Gone with the Wind." Does this mean that Gone with the Wind shouldn't have won Best Picture because Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (released that same year) had a better story, better characters, or even better acting, yet was considerably less popular than its competitor? Each film exists on its own terms and each is a fine piece of cinema in its own right. The inability to come to terms with this undeniable fact is the cause of division among critics and film scholars on the subject of Titanic.

This does not mean that Titanic is free of flaws. One thing that stands out as definitely sub par is the crude often inelegant dialogue of the script. (A problem that has plagued Cameron in all of his films – including Avatar – but had gone relatively unnoticed until he decided to do a period specific romantic epic in which his writing style is not as comfortable a fit.) As Brown and Ansen suggest in Newsweek (December 15, 1997), "Cameron should have lavished more of his perfectionist's zeal on his dialogue." Logically speaking, several script problems exist for Titanic besides its dialogue. For example, if the story is being related to us by Rose, how can she know anything about Jack before having met him during her attempted suicide (are his actions embellished by her to befit her memory of him?). Also of note are other instances wherein Rose recalls dialogue and actions she could have had no knowledge of (i.e. the framing of Jack by Cal or the decision by J. Bruce Ismay to push the engines as hard as they could go).

Although it can be argued that the acting throughout the film is at times wooden and merely meant to bring life to what amounts to simply stock characters (DiCaprio's Jack, throughout the first half of the film, stands out in this regard), none of these characters become, as Richard Corliss has accused them of being, "caricatures … designed only to illustrate a predictable prejudice." These so-called “caricatures” never work against the audience forcing a dislike of the film on the grounds of insulting their intelligence. Consider this: Titanic achieved the level of popularity it did without the help of a single international box-office star (although it certainly created one in DiCaprio – a feat which has been repeated to a certain extent with Avatar and Sam Worthington). Certainly this must attest to the entertainment value of the film. One thing that cannot be disputed is that once Titanic hits the iceberg 100 or so minutes into the film, the next 80 minutes are as thrilling as any action-adventure film has a right to be (and is definitely where Cameron shines). When combined with the romantic epic nature of the film, Titanic, as Owen Glieberman stated in Entertainment Weekly (December 19, 1997), "floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith."