Awesome / Titanic (1997)

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• "I'M THE KING OF THE WORLD!!!"
  • This quote is in 100th place in AFI's 100 Movie Quotes, and for a very good reason.
• "Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch. Let's stretch her legs."
  • The entire montage is not just a tribute to the ship, but a masterpiece of cinema. With that order, First Officer Murdoch and Sixth Officer Moody set the telegrams to full ahead. Chief Engineer Bell and his staff open the steam valves for the massive reciprocating engines, while Leading Fireman Fred Barrett in Boiler Room 6 yells for his men to work harder. Within minutes, the engines are churning away, driving the ship ahead at 21 knots. On the prow, Jack and Fabrizio are amazed to see a pod of dolphins racing alongside them.
  • Even the soundtrack sounds like the ship's engines being brought to full power.
• Rose spitting in Cal's face when he tries to force her into a lifeboat after she realizes he's framed Jack for theft and left him to die below deck. Cal's so caught off guard by this that Rose manages to slip free and run off to save Jack. The best part? Jack was the one who taught her to spit like that in the first place!
  • Also an excellent example of Throw It In!; the original script had Rose stick him with a pin, until Cameron realized that making the spitting lesson into a Chekhov's Skill would work perfectly.
  • Immediately prior to that scene, when Cal demonstrates absolutely no regard for those doomed to die on the ship and callously remarks that Jack's drawing "will be worth a lot more by morning", Rose hits him back with this:
    Rose: (Beat) You unimaginable bastard.
  • "I'd rather be his whore than your wife!"
    • In other words, Rose never further elucidating to Cal exactly why she prefers Jack's company over his proves that she's above him. In fact, the expression on Cal's face after she spits on him indicated that she told it like it is about him, and he knew exactly what Rose was saying about her.
• The scene right before the ending, where Rose dies an old woman warm in her bed, and we see the photos on her mantel that tell us what she did after the sinking of the Titanic. Okay, so, she cut herself off from her family and had only her talents and determination to see her through after the sinking, and arrives in New York with absolutely nothing except the Heart of the Ocean she never sold and yet she still managed to fulfill her promise to Jack to live her life to the fullest, traveling and falling in love and raising children and everything. All during a time when it wasn't easy to be a woman, and it is never easy for someone so sheltered to strike out like that on her own. But she did it because Jack helped her realize that she had agency and free will in her own life, and she used that free will to steer her fate and fulfill her promise to Jack. Awesome. Rest in peace, Rose. You earned it.
• Cal, unfortunately, survives the sinking. Rose does, however, make an offhanded comment about him shooting himself in the head in the crash of '29. She specifically states, in quite a nasty tone, that "the crash of '29 hit his interests hard, and he put a pistol in his mouth that year. Or so I read," indicating that she hardly kept up with him at all - she just got some satisfaction that she made it and he didn't.
• The entire second half of the movie is one for the filmmakers. Specifically, the ship sinking in almost real time.
• May also count as a Tear Jerker, but Father Thomas Byles, the priest towards the end, continues praying the Rosary with the passengers even as the ship is going vertical, clutching at the hands of a few passengers as he holds onto a piece of the deck for dear life, and even so, he keeps talking. It somehow seems both sad and inspirational. This also happened on the actual Titanic as all three priests stayed onboard to comfort the doomed.
  Priest: (as the deck nears vertical) Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
• Doubles as a Tear Jerker; Thomas Andrews (the designer of the ship) doing what he can to assist people in the evacuation, namely telling passengers and crew to put on their life jackets, as well as demanding that the boats be filled to capacity. (For clarification; the boats could be filled with 65 people, and some were being launched with as few as 12.) He also gives his own life jacket to Rose and tells her to save herself and Jack, resigning to go down with the ship.
• The Unsinkable Molly Brown ordering the women in the boat to grab an oar, and the captain of the lifeboat refuses because they'd swamp the boat, and her reply, "I don't understand either one of you! What's the matter with you?! IT'S YOUR MEN OUT THERE!"
  • Sadly, they missed (or dropped for the sake of time) an even better Real Life moment of awesome: The morning after, the Carpathia was spotted by the boat, and the guy at the tiller wasn't going to steer the boat over to it, saying it was to collect the bodies. What does Mrs. Brown do? Threaten to toss him overboard. The story may be apocryphal, but it would be in keeping with Molly's personality.
  • Another awesome thing omitted: by the time the survivors reached New York, Molly Brown helped to form a committee to aid the financially poor survivors, was voted the head of it, and raised $10,000 for the cause. Keep in mind she did all this in a matter of days. Adjusting for inflation, that's around $240,000.
• Rose punching the guy that was trying to take her away from Jack as well as how she searches for Jack instead of getting into a lifeboat in the rapidly flooding ship.
• Rose telling her overbearing and selfish mother what we all were thinking when she makes some haughty remark about whether the lifeboats will be seated according to class... "SHUT UP!" She then follows up by telling Ruth that this isn't a joke and that people are going to die tonight.
  Ruth: Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they're not too crowded.
  Rose: (glaring at her mother in utter disdain) Oh Mother...SHUT UP! Don't you understand?! The water is freezing and there aren't enough boats, not enough by half. Half the people on this ship are going to die.
  • A smaller one but when Rose chooses to leave her mother and Cal to rescue Jack.
    Rose: Goodbye, Mother.
• In spite of what he does immediately after, Officer Murdoch throwing Cal's bribe back in his face when he pushes forward to demand a place in the last lifeboat is still a well-deserved slap to someone arrogant enough to believe he could pay his way to safety.
  William Murdoch: Your money can't save you any more than it can save me!
• The musicians playing as the ship goes down, sacrificing their lives to keep the passengers calm. Made even more awesome by the fact that it actually happened in the real sinking. And those goes double for the engineers, who chose to stay in the bowels of the ship, frantically trying to keep the power on until just before the ship breaks in two.
  • The musicians' Face Death with Dignity moment is this in its entirety.
    Wallace Hartley: (as the water rushes up the deck toward them) Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.
• Fifth Officer Lowe gets a major one in a deleted scene when Ismay panics.
  Ismay: [pulling on a lifeboat line] There's no time to waste! Lower away! Lower away!
  Lowe: Hey! Get out of the way, you fool! Do you want me to drown the lot of them?!
  Ismay: Do you know who I am?!
  Lowe: You're a passenger, and I'm a ship's bloody officer! Now do as you're told!
  • Made even more awesome by the fact that it actually happened, as shown in the records of the inquest after the sinking. Lowe didn't know who Ismay was at the time and saw only an arrogant and hysterical passenger.
    • After the incident, Ismay mutters an apology and says that Lowe's "Quite right." This comes from a testimony of Ismay confirming these events. When asked about it, he said that Lowe was quite right to yell at him for panicking.
• At one point, Second Officer Lightoller is trying to load a boat and keep a crowd of desperate passengers at bay; he brandishes his gun and tells them to keep back, "Or I'll shoot you all like dogs!" Not the most heroic action (though also understandable, since he's trying to make sure the boat isn't swarmed and the people within can get to safety, and he's just seen a woman nearly fall to her death when someone accidentally knocked her overboard) but when he turns around and orders Lowe to man the boat, he's quickly loading the gun — meaning he pulled an incredibly effective bluff with an empty weapon. You've got to admire his sheer nerve. Johnny Philips, the actor playing Lightoller, ad-libbed this part, and when Cameron was impressed and told him to do it again he was hardly aware he'd done it, he'd been so caught up in the moment. ^note According to a greaser, Fred Scott, the real Fifth Officer Lowe did threaten a crowd with "If any man jumps into that boat, I will shoot him down like a dog."
• "Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was." Cue a slow fade from the wreck into the good ship in all her glory as she prepared to set off on her maiden voyage. From that point on, pretty much every shot of the ship is a moment of awesome in its own right. Not just for the incredible feat of engineering that the Titanic was, but for the incredible job James Cameron did to recreate her. Because CGI was still in its infancy, he rebuilt the entire ship. To scale. (With the help of Harland and Wolff, the original designers of Titanic, as well!) This extended to the interior sets as well, which were made to be as accurate as possible, and were really destroyed during the filming of the sinking. This feat was also accomplished through the use of smaller scale models, and minimal CGI. This was probably one of the biggest reasons the film became a world-wide phenomenon: James Cameron didn't just make an amazing movie set on Titanic, he brought the ship back to life.
  • At one point, Cameron gave the effects team a very simple instruction: "Imagine we're making a commercial for the White Star Line." The sweeping shots of the Titanic are absolutely gorgeous.
• The fact that Rose made it through life, on her own, in the 1920s, The Depression, 1930s, TWO WORLD WARS, and God knows what else; eighty-four years, and no matter the hardships, she never sold the diamond that Cal gave her. Not once. She managed eighty-four years on her own (and with her husband)... without any help from the asshole she loathed.
• Jack, Fabrizio and Tommy rip a bench from the floor and, with Rose ushering people out of their way, use it to batter down a locked gate in steerage. A neat little bit about this is that a random 4th guy joined in to help with the makeshift battering ram. Immediately after that, Tommy knocks down a crew member with one punch.
• This part of "My Heart Will Go On":
  "You're here, there's nothing I fear, and I know that my heart will go on..."
• You know that guy in all white, who was seen drinking from a flask while the stern was up, and was one of the five (including Jack and Rose) people who managed to climb all the way to the top of the stern as it sank? That's Charles Joughin... a man who did just that in real life — and technically he was the last survivor to have actually been on the Titanic.
  • He gave up his spot on a lifeboat — and a deleted scene shows him smashing windows and throwing deck chairs overboard to use as flotation devices. Yes, he really did that.
  • His actions were to also make sure there was enough food on the lifeboats just in case.
  • Right as the ship is in its final plunge, Joughin can be seen grabbing a passenger and pulling him over the railing to save him from falling into the icy water.
  • He also survived about two to three hours in the water before making it to a lifeboat and the overturned collapsible lifeboat... and only got swollen feet. When an elderly Rose mentioned that only six out of fifteen hundred people were saved, Charles Joughin was very likely one of the people of which Rose spoke.
  • What's more, he did this while drunk off his ass. He had a massive hangover on the Carpathia.
• Even though they fail to evade the iceberg, you have to give props to First Officer William Murdoch and the crew of the Titanic for remaining completely professional when they find out an iceberg is ahead and doing everything they can to try and steer the ship past it. Murdoch does everything right, and it almost works.
• Rose gets revenge on Cal by telling him she'd rather be Jack's whore than Cal's wife. She was too polite to say how she really felt until now, not out of kindness but because of how she's been brought up. The reason this doesn't make her a total Jerkass is that Cal happens to be an abusive fiancé.
• The alternative ending has Rose say "The hardest part about being so poor was being so rich. But every time I thought of selling it, I thought of Cal. And, somehow, I made it without his help." and gives the final fuck you to Caledon Hockley. She made it.
• Passengers and crew like Thomas Andrews, Captain Smith, the Straus couple, and Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet willingly going down with the ship can be considered this.
  • Ida was offered a place in a lifeboat and wouldn't have been scrutinized for taking it, but she chose to stay with her husband, even shutting him up when he wants her to evacuate at first.
  • Guggenheim says a very iconic and badass line before facing his death; "We've dressed in our best and are prepared to go down as gentlemen". Equally badass is the fact that his valet, Victor Giglio, refuses to abandon him even as the water begins to reach them. That's some Undying Loyalty.
  • Captain Smith not only goes down with the ship, but his final act is to grab the wheel rather than panic.

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