There is a fundamental reason why Titanic remains the second-biggest box-office grosser of all time: it works. Two (long) acts of romantic tosh followed by a final third of superior disaster movie, all tied up with the hiostorical actuality of the event, means that Titanic goes beyond being a proficient four-quadrant product. This anniversary release (15 years for the movie, 100 years for the actual event) has no Lucas-style revisionism, but it boasts an absolutely exemplary 3D conversion and digital spruce-up, from the incredible scale of the engine room to the extraordinary intimacy of Rose and Jack's final scenes, all making the film look fantastic back on the big screen. The only downside is that occasionally it does no favours to the ageing CGI, such as the (for their time) ambitious fly-bys of the vessel with the barely-drawn characters on deck. DiCaprio is excellent throughout, and Winslet is good but clearly yet to mature into the superb actress that she is today. James Cameron does deserve genuine credit for handling the sheer scale of his ambition and for the coverage he gets, especially in the interior water-bound scenes. It is of course not perfect - some of the dialogue remains quite extraordinary, fact and fiction sometimes sit together uneasily ("There's truth, but no logic,") and those wretched synthesised choirs on the soundtrack still grate - but at its heart lies a naively simplistic but touching love story, which together with one of the most awesome scenes in cinema (the splitting and sinking of the ship) back on the big screen, is truly impressive.
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