Given the easy potential for creating a compelling, suspenseful drama set aboard the most famous ship in history during its final hours, TITANIC is shamefully poor. It's a wasted opportunity from the get-go, a lazy class-based drama in which – unforgivably – the sinking of the ship comes second to high melodrama and character relationships. I can wholeheartedly pin the blame on the lapel of writer Julian Fellowes, an old-timer with successes in the past (most notably GOSFORD PARK) but whose recent work has been marred by stereotyped characters and a distinct lack of depth. I gave up on series two of DOWNTON ABBEY after one episode, and TITANIC follows that in a downward spiral.
The problems with the writing of this series are endless. The ridiculous decision was made to tell a four-hour miniseries in four separately placed episodes that cover much of the same ground from different perspectives. So we get numerous scenes which are repeated over the four episodes; if a conversation wasn't boring enough the first time around, rest assured they'll show it again another three times! The sinking takes place in the last half hour and almost seems incidental.
The characters are dull and featureless, each occupying a clichéd niche in society: there are the haughty aristocrats, the tradespeople, the servants, the Irish working classes, the stubborn captain, the decent officers, the good-looking Italian waiter. There's a reason why critics dubbed this Drownton Abbey – it's as if the ideas and ethos behind that series were simply transplanted onboard the Titanic with no effort to make them believable whatsoever. Even worse, Fellowes ignores dozens of untold dramas which have been written about but not filmed over the years in favour of his pat, seen-it-all-before character interactions.
It hurts that the characters are so vapid, formless and devoid of features. The aristocrats are invariably repulsive, their servants hard-working and good natured, the Irish shrill and argumentative. If it wasn't silly enough, a murderer is thrown into the mix for no good reason! Decent actors like Maria Doyle Kennedy and Toby Jones are lost amid the sea of faces – if there ever was a series with just too many extraneous characters, then this is it. Half of them are simply forgotten about come the ending (with dozens of loose ends), and none of them feature enough for us to care about them a jot.
Aside from the script, the production has genuinely bad values – it seems all the money was spent on the (wasted) ensemble cast members, and nothing was left for anything else. The Titanic is a cheesy CGI creation that wouldn't be out of place in a bad B-movie, there's no indication at any point that the sea was freezing cold (that's what killed the majority of the people, after all), and disaster scenes are limited to some water sloshing about on the deck – I thought the toilets had backed up for a second, I didn't realise that was supposed to be the ship going down! Add in tons of goofs and you have a production that's almost as much of a disaster as the sinking of the ship itself.
