titanic-review

Titanic Review

HUBRIS. THE WORD DESCRIBES AN EXAGGERATED pride or self-confidence often resulting in retribution. It's a word that could have a picture of a stately luxury liner Titanic beside it in the dictionary.

The ship left port on its maiden voyage on a Friday afternoon in 1912. On board were 1,290 passengers and 903 crew members. Two days later, it would slide beneath the North Atlantic, taking with 1,493 passengers and crew, including the captain, E.J. Smith.

Its resting place 13,000 feet down on the bottom of the ocean was finally discovered in 1985. Many expeditions had tried to find the fabled liner in the intervening 73 years, but each had come up empty-handed.

Why had so much effort gone into finding the sunken vessel? The answer is that the ship has always represented something larger than itself, something of almost mythical proportions. To understand the fascination, you have to go back to that word hubris, you also have to understand a little about the period in which the Titanic was launched.

The turn of the century was a time of unparalled optimism, a pre-world-war era where the lost generation had not yet gone missing and new technology promised a bounteous future full of marvels that would delight the mind and elevate the soul.

Such was the optimism of the time that people could actually believe such a thing as "unsinkable" and "ocean liner" could be paired in the same sentence. Faith in the new technology that went into creating the unsinkable Titanic was so strong that it carried only enough lifeboats to accommodate 1,178 of the 2,193 on board (the ship was actually capable of carrying 3,500 passengers and crew).

A hubristic faith in his insinkable ship encouraged the captain to virtually ignore a total of seven iceberg warning messages sent to the Titanic as he kept plowing on full steam ahead in the hope of breaking the transatlantic crossing record. And he would have done so, were it not for an encounter with one of those icebergs he'd been warned about.

The Titanic struck the iceberg shortly after midnight on Sunday, April 14. Many on board never even realized the collision had taken place. When the captain ordered everyone to assemble on deck, the first class passengers complained about going outside in the cold. After all, what was there to worry about on an unsinkable vessel?

When the decision to abandon ship was made, the first lifeboat left with only 28 people on board, although it could carry 65. The other lifeboats similarly left the ship loaded to only about half capacitiy. By 2:00 am, all the lifeboats were in the water. Shortly after, the Titanic disappeared from sight, the unsinkable ship going down to a watery grave in a little over two hours. In all, only 700 people survived.

The original Titanic cost a little over $8 million to build; the cost for director James Cameron to sink it again in Titanic is something in the neighborhood of $200 million.

After five years of researching the ship's demise, the Titanic script that Cameron penned attempts to humanize what is essentially a hubristic drama about a human tragedy brought on by exaggerated confidence in our ability to build a machine capable of defeating nature's blind retribution. His story focuses on a shipboard romance between two beautiful young people from different social classes - Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

"Previous films have done the drama of who got on the lifeboats and who didn't," says Cameron. "But the story to me was what happened to the people who were on the ship for the last 20 minutes after all the lifeboats has left."

It's a sobering image, thinking about what it must have been like to be out in the middle of a cold ocean at night with a sinking ship under your feet and no salvation in sight. One thing the doomed passengers knew for certain: no one would have the kind of hubris it takes to call an ocean liner unsinkable ever again.

by charles tatum

tribute magazine, December 1997