40%
There are too many superlatives uttered by those appearing here to adequately compensate for the simple fact that a sea grave, in itself, is not that interesting a subject for documentary. That this is the Titanic makes little difference since the story is very well known and has been thoroughly trawled for angles before.
To completely save this film from being one about nothing more than a famous ship corroding three kilometers down at the bottom of the Atlantic, CGI superimposes actors as ghosts on the exterior and interior shots of this elegant vessel. This is fun but does not really make up for the fact that the well worn cliches about the titanic are still being replayed: Man's hubris, social snobbery, alleged Edwardian elegance.
If only the filmmakers had had – moreover - the courage to let the images speak for themselves without the relentless barrage of "oh, wows" and "my Gods" this would have actually been an informative piece. The scientists masquerade as big children with expensive scientific toys; conveying little useful factual data save their narcissistic desire for foregrounding their rather trite emotions. Yet the images of the Titanic's interior are spooky enough to convey a sense of a technological marvel laid waste and the sense that, at any moment, a rotted corpse is going to float past the camera. That this never (& could never) happen does not detract in the least from the suspense conjured up by the very thought that it might.
That a film director of James Cameron's stature should associate himself with this dreck is difficult to fathom since he knows pictures speak louder than words. Yet here the old truism is reversed; revealing what a pointless documentary this really is.
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