Raise the Titanic movie review (1980)

Maybe so. The plan to float the Titanic sure is ingenious: Pump it full of plastic foam, attach giant inflatable balloons to its sides, and blast it free of the mud. Easy as pie. Reminds me of an old Uncle Scrooge comic in which Huey, Looey and Dewey were going to raise a sunken ship by pumping it full of Ping-Pong balls.

"Raise the Titantic" is best when it sticks to the subject. The movie succeeds in recreating some of the romance of the Titanic itself. It begins with old photographs of the great ship and with a sneaky preview shot of the ship in its watery grave. The plan to raise the ship involves the use of experimental Navy submarines, and the sequences devoted to the search are tightly directed and effective.

The payoff scenes work, too: The moment when the Titanic breaks the surface of the water is really very moving. And so is the shot of the ship being towed into New York Harbor. Some reviews of the film have criticized the special effects in those shots, but I thought they were pretty good.

I mean, of course they're using combinations of a smaller ship, scale models, tricks of perspective and special optical effects-but what'd you expect? The Titanic? If you're not prepared to go halfway with a movie named "Raise the Titanic" you are possibly in the wrong movie to begin with.

So I liked the stuff involving the ship. What I didn't like was the movie's compulsion to lay on all sorts of "human interest," as if raising the Titanic weren't enough. Why don't they just once make a thriller that's about its premise from beginning to end? Why didn't they have the narrative discipline to really go into the history of the Titanic, the odds on its still being intact, the ways of salvaging it?

The newspapers have been full of stories recently about an actual expedition to find the Titanic, but this movie would rather blast us with a lot of hot air involving (as I was just lamenting) The Girl and The Russians.

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