Titanic

I've read several reviews of Julian Fellowes' Titanic, and I agree with comments about the choppy, confusing editing (I'm sure there was a point to it, but I kept thinking I had started with the wrong episode, or in the middel of one...) I also agree with those that found the cast to be lacking in chemistry or real emotion. But what bothered me most about this version was that there was absolutely no sense of the arctic, icy cold. Nobody breathed vapor. Nobody froze to death -- EVRYBODY that went into the water drowned? Really? That sounds like (yet another) glaring historical inaccuracy. There was no mention of the cold throughout the "sinking scenes" except for one character mentioned she'd rather freeze than deal with "those people." There was no ice anywhere except the CGI iceberg. This version could have been set in a lukewarm summer lake, for all the impression of cold it produced. (And okay, maybe James Cameron put a little TOO much emphasis on clouds of vapor and frozen hair, but at least you FELT how cold it was!) If the point of this version was to make us feel the total experience of this tragedy, it missed by an artic ocean. Pun intended.

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.

I'm quite an avid Titanic enthusiast. Not as big a buff as I used to be, but I could probably still teach a couple of things. I wasn't expecting great things of this title (I have issues regarding things made by ITV), but as its the 100th anniversary coming up, I felt I should give this a watch, without trying to get to excited (although admittedly, I was really looking forward to watching it).

So far, I've only seen two episodes, and I have to say, while they aren't perfect, I feel that they are a good watch for a casual enthusiast of Titanic. Let me just touch on a couple of bad points.

Now, I don't know as much as a lot of people about the ship, but it does have some errors in historical accuracy, although reviewing from my perspective as somebody who knows a fair bit, but not a massive amount (or somebody, like me, who used to know, but is too stupid to remember...), I can say that you won't notice anything so bad that will ruin it for you, even though looking at the forums, some people seem to have taken great offence to this.

My main gripe with these episodes is that they are very rushed. A lot of effort has gone into the writing, but really I think there is too much going on and in such a short space of time to fit it in. While it was an interesting, if ambitious attempt at telling the story, I have to admit, I think that it would have worked better by going through in order, rather than chopping and changing the main characters every episode (although I have to say, it's nice they aren't doing a Cameron and just focusing on a couple of people). I'm hoping for the final chapter to be tighter.

Apart from the above, I really enjoyed watching the first two episodes and will be recording the final two as well. I'd really recommend this to someone like myself, it has some interesting characters and plots, and hopefully will be soon setting up to be an entertaining and engaging finale.

The DVD hasn't been released here yet but the 'mini-series' is now over. It is difficult to call this amalgamation of snippets about an historic tragedy a miniseries because it was spread out so unevenly (3 hours on first night, one hour on second night) and we are now informed that the film is a total of 184 minutes which means that the fourth hour was completely filled with the most distracting and disrupting of commercials. Why this new version of TITANIC wasn't place on cable television where it could have been enjoyed on one uninterrupted three hour showing is beyond understanding. Perhaps when the DVD is released and there are no loud and ugly commercials every 5 minutes the story will hold together.

Julian Fellowes, so respected for his writing of such series as Downton Abbey, etc. seems to have the urge to tell the story of the event through quick snippets of personal stories among the passengers - a commendable idea, but when the tiny tales are buried in the almost immediate collision with the iceberg and the attempt to flesh out the story by making it about how tragedy affects people's relationships come as little disconnected pop-ups, it is difficult to care about anybody, much less get to know them well enough to remember them at picture's end. Granted there are some moments before the ship is finished that emphasize the fact that the unsinkable Titanic was rushed to completion before it was safely ready, and those flashbacks to offer some interesting moments.

But basically the story is the same as all the other TITANIC movies - a study about class distinction not only among the peerage of Brits but also the differentiation among first, second and third (steerage) classes - with a hefty dollop of snubbing the crass American passengers. Jon Jones directs this amalgamation of ideas. There are some brief but tasty moments for actors such as Glen Blackhall (a memorable Paolo) and Antonio Magro (Paolo's brother Mario), Peter McDonald, Steven Waddington, Ruth Bradley Linus Roache and Geraldine Somerville as the Mantons, Toby Jones and Maria Doyle Kennedy, Celia Emrie, James Wilby and Dragos Bucur (the stowaway Russian). The rest of the cast is so little used that they all but disappear.

The film was apparently shot on digital video. Some of the effects are fine, but the whole film lacks cohesion - at least on the American release on commercial television!

Tale of the Titanic disaster in four parts. The first three tell the same basic story but through the eyes of passengers in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class (steerage). The story lines overlap and all meet in the same disastrous finale: the sinking of the ship.

Although there are no big names in the cast, several are familiar faces (Maria Doyle Kennedy, Linus Roache, Toby Jones, Steven Waddington, Stephen Campbell Moore, Celia Imrie, James Wilby, Linda Kash).

To my knowledge this is the only "Titanic" story that has included the real-life Dorothy Gibson (played by Sophie Winkleman), an American movie actress, who survived the disaster. Back in the US, she was rushed into "Saved from the Titanic" within a month of the sinking. She played herself, recounting the disaster, but was so overcome by grief, she suffered a nervous breakdown during the filming and retired from acting. The 1912 film was an absolute sensation, one of the biggest hits of the time. The film was tragically lost in a 1914 studio fire.