Why does everyone hate Titanic?

I am really not sure. I think the general consensus is that TITANIC is overrated, but that it's still good.

IMO, the dialog is not great, but the story structure holds up. Personally, I was a big fan of Leonardo DiCaprio before and after TITANIC, and it kind of pisses me off that people still hold a grudge against him for this movie, and claim he can't act.

He had done BASKETBALL DIARIES before TITANIC, and he was the first person to be considered for the lead in BOOGIE NIGHTS. He choose to do TITANIC, instead to overcome his phobia of the water. I can't help but think how different his career would have been if he hadn't done this.

I don't believe TITANIC deserved the Oscar for Best Picture, but ever since SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE won, I can't even complain. I was taking a film class when TITANIC was in the theater, and my professors believed it to be a very well made movie. I don't think they would have said the same about SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.

My understanding is that people thinks it fails because they think it's a romance, as in Capital-R Romance, where the hero and heroine will have a Happily Ever After together, and they don't.

What they're missing is the fact that it's not a Capital-R Romance. If it were a novel, it would be Women's Fiction--the main throughline is how Rose comes to be her own person. Jack dying is just part of what pushes her out of her rut and into the woman who dared that we saw through all the photos on her bureau.

So, for those who wanted the love story to be a Capital-R Romance, it fails. And a lot of people apparently want that.

To me, that's sad, because that means they weren't allowing the story to be what it was and hate it because it's not what they wanted. I thought it was a very good story as it was.

I haven't seen the movie because I don't like Leonardo DiCaprio so to me, it's neither good nor bad. It's a movie I don't want to see.

DeleyanLee said:

My understanding is that people thinks it fails because they think it's a romance, as in Capital-R Romance, where the hero and heroine will have a Happily Ever After together, and they don't.

What they're missing is the fact that it's not a Capital-R Romance. If it were a novel, it would be Women's Fiction--the main throughline is how Rose comes to be her own person. Jack dying is just part of what pushes her out of her rut and into the woman who dared that we saw through all the photos on her bureau.

So, for those who wanted the love story to be a Capital-R Romance, it fails. And a lot of people apparently want that.

To me, that's sad, because that means they weren't allowing the story to be what it was and hate it because it's not what they wanted. I thought it was a very good story as it was.

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I agree. I liked the way it ended. I didn't think his death negated their love.

I've seen a few minutes here and there of the first three-quarters of the film. Call it 'romance', 'woman's fiction', whatever, made-up love stories grafted onto a dramatic true-life story is not my thing.
I have, however watched the last bit, the last of the sinking and the survivors on the ocean, every time it comes on TV. It's a gorgeously horrible depiction of what it must have been like, how cold the Atlantic would have been.
It's a shame there never would have been the funding for Cameron to do a straight-up documentary of the one voyage of the Titanic.

(And the scene with old Rose dying and returning to the ship-as-it-was, was a perfect ending.)

Okay here's my list:

1. Dicaprio. He can give fantastic performances, but in this he looks like he just can't be bothered in this.

2. The romance seems unnecessary. The story of Titanic is epic anyway.

3. Characterisation is pretty 2D. The villians are evil, and the hero is of the romantic, variety [would have prefered him to be more Byronic.] It's cliched.

4. They edited out the best bits.

5. It's emotionally manipulative, in a bad way.

6. Script.

7. CGI.

8. James Cameron can only do one story.

9. The music is practically Braveheart.

10. Too long. Cal chasing Rose and Jack through the sinking ship was unneccesary.

Best thing about Titanic? Kate Winslet.

'Tis my favourite movie, though I think quite a lot of people find it overrated.

Too long. The ship itself sank in two hours and 40 minutes and the film went on for longer than three hours, as I recall.

But I just loathed the film, personal dislike. And couldn't get Celine Dion's song out of my head for a week.

Why does everyone hate Titanic?

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Well, it's one of the top-grossing films of all time, so I'd say your question is based upon a false premise. A lot of people (as in, tens of millions) love or at least enjoy that movie.

Why do they like it?

1) Great production values; visually splendid.

2) Appealing actors, and romance.

3) Eye candy for history buffs and the many people fascinated by that ship.

I'm not that fond of it, myself, but I don't hate it. There are good and bad points.

It really does look great, and I love the scene where Titanic leaves port at Southampton.

As actors, I like Winslet, DiCaprio and Billy Zane.

Kate Winslet gets nekkid, God bless 'er.

Now, I think we can stipulate that the story is not drama, but melodrama. There's nothing wrong with that; but my problem is that it's dull melodrama. For this, no one's to blame but James Cameron, because it's his script.

Cameron isn't a great writer. He's great at directing coherent, kinetic action scenes (hacks like Michael Bay could learn from him). His dialogue is fine for something like Terminator. But he wasn't qualified to do a good melodrama set in 1912. (And he's not great at original ideas; but his cheerful appropriation of storylines is a whole other subject.)

Cameron really should have turned the script over to another writer; there are writers who eat, drink and breathe that period of history, and -- even keeping the hackneyed poor boy/unhappy rich girl romance -- could have produced a script with greater depth of character, vibrant dialogue, and layers of historical resonance. (Also better dramatic pacing; Cameron just does not know when to stop with the action sequences. Not only are our pair of lovers trying to survive on a sinking ship, but they're being shot at. Ridiculous. And it really annoyed me that, after Rose takes heroic action to get to Jack and set him loose, he immediately takes charge as if she's witless. He informs her that the passageway in which they're waist-deep in seawater is flooding. Then for five minutes the dialogue consists of him telling her "This way!" as he drags her through the ship.)

In short: disappointing script.

Also, there's that awful song.

And, according to a book I just read (Titanic's Last Secrets, by Brad Matsen) it looks like the scene of the ship is sinking may be inaccurate. (I mean, the ship definitely did sink, but the details of exactly how that happened have been in dispute for many years, with some compelling new evidence having come to light recently.) Though we can't blame Cameron for that; he was working with the best information available at the time (1997).

Speaking of accuracy -- although the ship's band (or half of it; there were two bands that sometimes joined together) almost certainly did not play "Nearer My God to Thee", I'll give Cameron that one, because I love that scene.

James Cameron can do visually impressive films without question. He hasn't done anything worth watching in terms of characters since The Abyss.

I think it comes down whether you like corny sentimentality. The movie is a huge tear-jerker, and some people just hate that kind of thing. Which is fine. You like what you like; nothing wrong with that. I personally found the movie to be very entertaining. It made me cry.

It's a similar thing with books.

Some people will read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight and find it corny. They will read Nicholas Sparks and find it sappy. They will hate novels like that. Part of it stems from snobbery, I suspect. They will look down on books that they deem to be not "real" literature. They will criticize the lack of subtlety, quality of prose, etc. The criticisms will sometimes carry a whiff of condescending attitude. I'm not saying that Sparks and Meyer are the greatest writers ever. I'm just sometimes surprised at the amount of vitriol against them (and other popular authors).

My guess is that a similar dynamic is at play with respect to Titanic.

Also, Titanic is immensely popular. Some people just instinctively hate popular things. They don't like to have the same taste as the masses because they deem themselves to be more cultured, learned, refined, etc. (which, again, suggests a trace of snobbery).

Of course, snobbery is not the only reason for people who hate those things. But my guess it's a significant percentage.

I don't hate Titanic. I haven't even seen more than the first hour of it.

I don't think everyone hates it. In fact, most people that have happened to talk about it around me seem to like it.

I think the love story without the back-drop of the Titanic is rather poor and suffers from clichés. But it's not the first time (or the last) that Cameron's sceneries steal the spotlight away from the actual story.

In any case it's one of those movies about which almost everybody has a vocal opinion. In my (small) experience most of the dislike seems to stem from two things. One, the entire movie seemed to be all hyped about DiCaprio, down to the point that several people claimed that was the only reason they went to see the movie in the first place. Many, many people seemed to dislike Céline Dion's title track because it was so difficult to get rid off once heard. And it played forever on the radio.

Maybe Céline Dion is an acquired taste, but I thought the whole soundtrack was pretty good. The bit where the ship leaves Southampton for instance, is beautiful. So vibrant and jubilant. I ended up buying the CD almost only for that.

I really like it, but I watch it in a particular way. I watch the first part up until Jack and Rose meet, then fast forward over the melodrama to the bit where they hit the iceberg. The ship going down is beautifully done.

The first time I saw it was in an old-fashioned cinema (the kind with balcony and boxes and lots of red velvet) in Athens, Greece. The audience was fantastic. The women sighed at the love story, the men shouted encouragement to Jack and everyone sobbed and cried at the sad bits. Awesome!

I loved Titanic. I even liked the soundtrack, Celine Dion and all.

Sue me.

The story is crap and cliched, but it delivered what I want a movie to deliver: spectacular eye candy and excitement and drama. I don't expect movies to be deep or complex; it's nice when occasionally they are, but I read books for depth and complexity.

You know what always bugged me about this one? And this is silly, I know. It's already been stated that Cameron isn't exactly original in his stories, but back in the 80s there was a YA series of romance novels, Harlequin-lite basically, called Sunfire books. I used to read them all the time and there was one named Nicole with this exact plot. Exact plot. Except being Harlequin-Lite, Price, the aristocrat realized how in love Nicole and Karl were, and sacrificed his seat on the life boat for Karl so the two could be together, ensuring his own demise.

From the cover:

(#19) Nicole by Candice F. Ransom

Wealthy, sixteen-year-old Nicole Sanders encounters tragedy and romance with two very different men--Karl, a young immigrant, and English aristocrat Price Armsey--when she and her mother sail home aboard the Titanic.
​

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Although I will say, I don't hate Titanic. I don't like Cameron much, but this movie is just so pretty to look at.

To me, Titanic suffered from the same issues that made Tw1l1ght a love it/ hate it phenomenon. All of the secondary characters were more interesting than the principal pair. My favorites were Astor and Molly Brown. You don't get more heartbreaking than the woman tucking her kids into bed as the ship goes down, knowing they'll never get up again.

And I still think that the no-dialogue, all instrumental sinking scene with the orchestra playing "Nearer My God To Thee" is a winning visual/emotional combo. Ditto the priest holding a prayer service (and hanging on by his fingernails) as the ship angled up so sharply people were sliding down the deck. The older couple who went to bed and waited - those who just accepted what was coming and didn't panic or try and run over everyone else to survive were the most wrenching. (One story I wish that had made it into the film, but didn't was about Astor who, while putting his wife into a boat noticed a boy who was 11 or 12 being told he was too old to qualify as a "child" under the "women and children first" rule and made to stand back. A few minutes later, the boy was seen being put into the boat - wearing Astor's wife's coat and hat. THOSE are the sorts of stories needed in a movie like Titanic; not made up melodrama.)

So much of the central storyline felt like filler, though. It took away from the moments with real punch. There was no need for Jack to be in handcuffs below deck, or for the fiance to go chasing them through the ship as it went down, or for the moment Rose proved herself to be brainless and selfish by first taking a seat on a lifeboat that could have gone to someone else, then jumping out of it after it was too far down the line for anyone to use the space she gave up.

Cyia said:

You don't get more heartbreaking than the woman tucking her kids into bed as the ship goes down, knowing they'll never get up again.

So much of the central storyline felt like filler, though. It took away from the moments with real punch. There was no need for Jack to be in handcuffs below deck, or for the fiance to go chasing them through the ship as it went down, or for the moment Rose proved herself to be brainless and selfish by first taking a seat on a lifeboat that could have gone to someone else, then jumping out of it after it was too far down the line for anyone to use the space she gave up.

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This.

I didn't cry, or even choke up when Jack died. But when the camera pulled back into a long-shot of thousands of the thousands people that would die of hypothermia, I got choked up for the people who really did die like that.

I was surprised that I liked Titanic when I first saw it. Being 12 and male, I was out of the targeted demographic, but I found the atmosphere and effects to be quite beautiful. I sympathized with the characters, and I was heartbroken when the ship sank and the people started to die, and I almost teared up at the ending (although to this day, I'm not sure if it was from sadness or not). The love story (excepting the end) was passable, and I liked the music.

Granted, I have pretty odd tastes in... well. Everything, but I still liked it. I'd watch it again if I had a copy.

I find the writing predictable and unnatural. I love a good romance, but I don't like romance at the expense of three dimensional characters. I didn't care about anyone.

But the sinking sequence was incredibly impressive (at the time, at least).

Not everybody hates it. It would have not reached the highest-box-office of all time (until Avatar) otherwise.
The same thing happens to Abba. Everybody seems to hate it, but Mamma Mia broke the box offices record and every seemed to know the songs.

Titanic is a good movie overall. It tells an epic manmade failure wrapped inside a doomed romance. That's it in a nutshell.

I was spoiled for the ending.

/jk

No hate here. I just wasn't really inspired to see it. Not big on melodrama and teen angst. Those may or may not have actually been in the movie but that was what I got from the trailers.

If a trailer fails to hook me, interest just isn't there to overcome that initial impression.

I very much enjoyed Titanic when it first came out (so much that I actually went to see it three times with various groups of friends). But then Titanic went the way of other pop culture phenomenons--it got incredibly overrated. Every time you turned around, an ad was on TV for the movie or soundtrack, Leo and Kate were all over the entertainment shows/magazines, and "My Heart Will Go On" was played ad nauseum on every soft rock radio station.

Too much of a good thing can annoy anyone. It definitely accounts for my love/hate relationship with the film.

"Hate" is too strong a word.

To me, the raves have been a kind of hysteria. I never got that.

Not bad. I don't see a picture worth the $100 million to make it. But neither am I reminded of Ishtar or Heaven's Gate. An OK movie made with a blockbuster budget.