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Except for the cold waters of the North Atlantic.
I'm flying, Jack.
—Rose DeWitt Bukater, reciting the film's most iconic line
I'm the king of the world!
—Jack Dawson, reciting the film's other most iconic line
The movie of 1997. It was a darling of most critics at the time, a commercial splash, won 11 Oscars including Best Picture, and quickly became a source of many Stock Parodies. Unadjusted for inflation, it's the highest second-highest-grossing movie ever, recently beaten out by Cameron's own Avatar. (If you adjust for inflation, Titanic drops about five slots, but even so it's still one of the highest-grossing film of the last quarter century.) Cameron now has roughly enough money to raise the Titanic and fire it toward Pandora. Currently, the film is facing a bit of a backlash, due both to its being schmaltzy and the fact that it made loads of money, but the same could be said of many such films. We're not going to go further than that other than to say Your Mileage May Vary.
In case you don't remember '97 or you were living in a cave at that time, Titanic tells the story, in Flashback, of the two fictional Star Crossed Lovers Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater. Unfortunately, they both happen to be aboard the ill-fated ocean liner of the title, which, as we all know, struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. There's also a Love Triangle involving Rose's "evil" Disposable Fiancé Caledon "Cal" Hockley, who decides the best solution is to literally Murder The Hypotenuse, Jumping Off The Slippery Slope in the process. This more-or-less leads to the film's Downer Ending Bittersweet Ending.
Launched the A-list careers of Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet.
This film provides examples of:
- Acceptable Targets: For a movie that cost $200 million to make, it's a little shocking how contemptuously it portrayed the first class, even those who stayed behind to die when they could have escaped to a life boat.
- Age Cut
- Alternate Character Interpretation (Cal slides a lot on his own little personality scale.)
- Anyone Can Die: Once the ship starts going down, supporting characters start dropping like flies including Jack himself.
- Auto Erotica (A thousand beds on board, and they consummate their love in the back of a car?)
- Hey, sex in the back seat of a car would be quite a novelty in 1912.
- Plus a car in the ship's storage would have been quite secluded from prying eyes.
- Award Bait Song ("My Heart Will Go On". And James Horner had to wait for a proper moment to present it to the hot-headed James Cameron...)
- Award Snub (Kate Winslet)
- Leo didn't even get a nomination.
- The look on Winslet's face when Helen Hunt won was priceless. It's like she was thinking: "I got completely stark naked and they give the Oscar to her?"
- BFM
- Bittersweet Ending (Jack freezes to death, but Rose meets him again when she finally passes.)
- That might not even be true: James Cameron. (2005). DVD Commentary. 20th Century Fox. "The big ambiguity here is 'is she alive and dreaming' or 'is she dead and on her way to Titanic heaven?' I'll never tell. Of course, I know what we intended... The answer has to be something you supply personally; individually."
- That scene is called "A Promise Kept" in the DVD, so it's plausible to assume that Rose died. Though the title could refer to all those pictures you next to her when she is in bed, showing that she promised to do all the things Jack told her to do.
- Evidence certainly looks to point to she's dead, as everyone that greets her in the "dream" died on the ship, like the musicians, Jack Bristow, et al.
- Badass (The band members certainly deserve this, at least.)
- Ahem, Jack protecting Rose to the very end and making her promise him that she'll survive no matter what, letting her take the door to float on despite knowing the water was freezing and he would die, making a battering ram out of a bench to break down a gate barring the way back to the top decks, managing to talk Rose out of committing suicide...
- Critical Research Failure (Remember how Jack said he used to go to Lake Wissota? Well it was man-made. You can guess where this is going
 .) Since the construction of Lake Wissota began in 1915, Jack must be a time traveler...
- Hey, he's anachronistic anyway. That haircut kinda stands out, for instance.
- You see those paintings that Rose and Cal argue over? The ones we see submerged in the Stateroom as the ship goes down? They're all well known, surviving paintings by Monet and Picasso, including Picassos Le Demoiselles d'Avignon-which is currently sitting in M Mo MA, and which Picasso never sold in his life.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: The Titanic has a crowning band of awesome. Especially notable since this happened in real life.
- Dawson Casting (Kate Winslet was 22 by the end of filming, playing a "seventeen"-year-old. Leonardo's a bit sketchier, it's never said how old he's meant to be.)
- An excerpt from the script in a "Making Of" book states that Jack is twenty: Di Caprio was 23 when the film came out, so this trope applies more to Kate Winslet than to him.
- Demoted To Extra: Remember the blonde chick that dances with Fabrizzio in 3rd class? She was written as a opposite counterpart to Rose, a girl that finds her love interest in her class and follows her strict parents' orders without question (down to refusing to go with Fabrizzio once the ship begins to sink, despite he knows better the way to the lifeboats). She's also the blonde girl that hangs on the railing before falling to her death.
- Disposable Fiancé (Cal)
- Domestic Abuser: Cal, Cal, a hundred times Cal.
- Downer Ending (for most of the people on the ship)
- The Edwardian Era (1912 scenes)
- Everybody Remembers The Stripper: Because the most memorable part of a movie with a sinking ship and many dying? The protagonist getting topless with her boyfriend.
- Face Cam
- Fan Dumb: The below trope is often assumed by people because there is a fairly significant proportion of them who want Kate Winslet to divorce (again) from that guy she's happily married to, and Leonardo Di Caprio to ditch that supermodel he's dating now for each other. Winslet and Di Caprio consider themselves as virtual brother and sister, and nothing more.
- Fan Hater: It's widely assumed that most of the filmgoers were dumb pre-teens obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio.
- The filmgoers who saw it multiple times (read: more than twice) usually were, at least.
- Flashback
- Foregone Conclusion (The ship sinks; you'll know this even if you're totally clueless about history as the sunken ruins are shown and discussed in the opening)
- This troper fondly remembers how her dad tried to get her mom to go to the movie. "It ends happily!" "THE SHIP SINKS, HOW COULD IT?!"
- Also Rose survives, since it's her who is telling the story 85 years later. That certainly cuts some of the tension in that scene by the flooding hallway.
- Fake American (Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater)
- Supposedly a native of Philly; came off sounding like a New Englander.
- Follow The Leader (Pearl Harbor, which has a similar romance-against-epic-tragedy-of-the-20th-century concept, and like most following works, has almost no understanding of why it worked here.)
- Foot Focus (Although not bare; during the scenes where Rose is planning to jump off the back of the ship. Her beaded heels, his dirty big ol' boots...)
- Foreshadowing (You could make a drinking game out of how many times the cast mentions that it would be very, very bad if the Titanic sinks.)
- Fridge Logic (The heroine ends her story barefoot and penniless in New York, but according to her collection of photographs was able to afford a life of upper-class adventure, despite still owning the priceless necklace she tosses into the ocean at the end of the movie. Ironically this is supposed to indicate that her story was true.)
- This could easily be explained by the events of her life after Titanic. Her husband could have been a wealthy man when she married him, or Rose could have found substantial success on the stage when she was an actress (she does, after all, bear a rather striking resemblance to Kate Winslet).
- Gorgeous Period Dress (for the first class, at least)
- Grande Dame: Rose’s mother and a number of the other female passengers is tragic variations on the character type, while “Molly” Brown is a subversion.
- Her Heart Will Go On (Trope Namer)
- Hey Its That Guy / Hey Its That Voice (Jack Bristow as Mr. Andrews the shipbuilder, to name one)
- Historical In Joke / It Will Never Catch On (Rose collects Picasso paintings and has read the works of Sigmund Freud, who nobody has heard of.)
- They weren't Picassos, they were Monets.
- Rose definitely mentioned a painting by "Something Picasso".
- She has both-several are definitely Monet, but she also has some Primitive Cubist pieces. Assuming she's still got some of their work back home, that could help to explain the Fridge Logic above.
- Except we see them go down with the ship as the stateroom floods...not to mention the fact that due to the [1] discussed above, Cameron gave Rose paintings that were sitting in Picassos basement at the time...
- Historical Villain Upgrade: That guy who went nuts and started shooting people? The real man is generally considered a hero for his actions to save people that day.
- Hype Backlash (one of the definitive examples; the film produced torrents of praise on release, and this has contributed to an excessive backlash against the film in subsequent years)
- Infant Immortality: Averted. Hard. Remember that young French mother with her baby asking Captain Smith where she should go? Yeah... don't worry, you'll see them again...
- Insert Cameo
- I Was Quite A Looker ("Wasn't I a dish?")
- It Has Been An Honor (The band)
- Its All Junk The "Heart of the Ocean" now really is the heart of the ocean.
- Jerkass (Cal)
- Jumping Off The Slippery Slope (Cal)
- Karma Houdini (Cal, sort of - he lives through the sinking of the ship, but it's mentioned later on that he committed suicide when The Great Depression rolled around, making his eventual 'punishment' completely unrelated to his actions on the ship.)
- What the heck was he doing in the vision Rose had about the afterlife anyway? Only the good people and the ones who died aboard the Titanic were supposed to be there!
- Also, Ismay. But that's an example of a Real Life Karma Houdini.
- Live the rest of your life with the partial responsibility of killing hundreds of people, the scorn upon you being so great a film made decades later touches on your deed, and you're saying he escapes Karma?
- Love It Or Hate It (Possibly one of the most decisive examples in movie history; some even consider it Deader Than Disco)
- Love Triangle (Jack, Rose and Cal)
- Melodrama, some would argue
- Memetic Mutation: The two iconic lines at the top of the page, and the propellor guy.
- Murder The Hypotenuse (Quite literally, Cal's plan to get Rose back)
- Never Heard That One Before (All the times people use the fact that the ending is obvious as a way to put down the film)
- The Nineties (1997 scenes)
- Nipple And Dimed (Subverted: Kate Winslet nude for Jack's painting of Rose only earned a PG-13. Reportedly, Cameron worked with the editors and the MPAA to determine just how many seconds he could get away with and keep it PG-13.)
- Not A Game
- Pimped Out Dress
- Pretty In Mink (This was likely more for historical accuracy than anything else. Also, a poster for "Ghosts of the Abyss" showed a woman wearing an ermine cape and muff.)
- Reality Is Unrealistic (Through the years, this troper has heard constant complaints about how hard to believe is that the lights were on up to the ship's breaking in two, or that the guys in the machine room kept working while the ship sank, how they "screwed up" the turning orders, or even that the Statue of Liberty shouldn't be there; well, when you do the proper research, it turns out that all these things happened in Real Life and the movie got them right).
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The captain and Mr. Andrews.
- Rich Suitor Poor Suitor: Jack vs. Cal
- Screw The Money I Have Rules (Take That, Cal!)
- Screw The Rules I Have Money: Cal tries to play this. Doesn't work. However, there's also a deleted scene of a possible Real Life case where a wealthy couple (in that lifeboat with twelve people in it) bribe the oarsmen to not go back and pick up survivors.
- She Cleans Up Nicely (Applies more to Jack, but there you go.)
- Shout Out (Rose mentions the Cunard Line's RMS Mauretania, one of Titanic's rivals on the Transatlantic Route.)
- Spectacle (The film is heavily reliant on this for its emotional impact; it loses a lot when not seen in a movie theater.)
- Shown Their Work: Cameron and the set designer's conducted exhaustive research on the ship, from the measurments of the individual rooms, to the carpet designs to the china patterns, even going to Harland and Wolff-the builders themselves-to look up rare blueprints and never-before-seen photographs to make sure they had every possible detail. In fact, Ken Marschall-the formost expert on the Titanic design and the painter of almost every painting of either the Titanic wreck or the sinking in the past 30 some-odd years (seriously, he seems to be on-call whenever a documentary needs a painting) is quoted saying that he didn't call their set a set, to him it was the Titanic.
- Star Crossed Lovers (Jack and Rose)
- Star Making Role: For both Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet
- Strongly Worded Letter (Jack quips that he's going to write one to White Star.)
- Tear Jerker (This quote has been used on this website a billion times before, but seriously. If you do not cry at at least one thing during this movie, you have absolutely no soul.)
- (When the band starts playing.)
- (The bit where Jack dies—though thanks to the Romantic Plot Tumor, some in the audience actually laughed or even cheered.)
- (The woman putting her children to bed and talking to them about heaven. Aw Gawd.)
- (The old man and his wife (Isidor and Ida Straus, owners of Macy's) who died together in bed.)
- (Speaking of kids, remember that lost crying boy in the flooding hallway? Or how about that crying girl hiding behind the davit motor? Or the mom telling her son(?) that "It'll all be over soon" during the final plunge?)
- (The last scene, what happened to the last scene?)
- (The scene where Jack convinces Rose to get on one of the lifeboats, assuring her that he and Cal will catch another one later. When it becomes clear that there isn't another boat waiting (for Jack at least), he continues to watch Rose being lowered down with the rest of the passengers. Then Rose, unable to go through with it, scrambles up the side of the ship and back to Jack. Of course, his reaction is what makes it all the more heartrending ("I couldn't do it, Jack!" "You're so stupid Rose, you're so goddamn stupid!" all the while kissing and hugging her).)
- Technology Porn (Who gets more screen time, Kate Winslet or the Titanic?)
- That Woman is Dead (Rose.)
- Timeshifted Actor (Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart as Rose)
- The Unfair Sex (It is, of course, perfectly okay for Rose to cheat on Cal.)
- Well, yes, it IS fair, because (1) Rose is not yet married to Cal, and (2) it is arranged anyway.
- But was it needed to make him an absolute Yandere just because they needed a Card Carrying Villain?
- It really wasn't like Rose, as a woman in the early 1900's had a lot of choice in the matter. She couldn't just call it off and walk away. One could just as easily ask, 'Is it okay for Jack to have sex with another man's fiance?' So, it's really society that's unfair in this context.
- Villainous Breakdown: Cal, on account of being such a Yandere.
- Wall Banger: Early on in the movie, Jack gives a speech about how the ocean water is cold enough to give you hypothermia very, very quickly. While the ship is sinking, he and Rose spend an awful lot of time walking and even swimming in it as they try to escape from the ship's lower decks.
- This troper just figured he was exaggerating a lot in his hypothermia speech. He was trying to scare Rose into deciding not to jump into the water and kill herself, after all.
- Similarly, after making one attempt to climb onto the driftwood that saves Rose, he gives up and freezes to death. If he'd been able to get his torso out of the water at least, he might have made it.
- But the pair had no idea that a lifeboat would turn around and come back to look for survivors. If they had known this, they probably would have put more effort into staying alive. For example, they could have been continually switching places on the driftwood, so as to make sure to keep moving and therefore keep their blood flowing. (It's unclear how long they were waiting for the rescue boat, so they may not have been able to keep this up anyway.) As it was, Rose was already on the driftwood and they couldn't both fit on it, so he did the gentlemanly thing, knowing that he would die first as a result — perhaps he even fantasized that Rose's driftwood would magically carry her to safety. He was more or less right about this.
- What Could Have Been: Like Avatar, this was written as a 4 hour-long movie and cut down to a 3 hour-long film.
- What Happened To The Mouse: The fate of a surprising number of minor characters and extras can be known either reading the script or really paying attention to the background in the movie. Or looking into a real Historical book, in case they are not fictional.
- Yandere: Cal.
- You Fail Astronomy Forever (The end scene has an inaccurate night sky that is composed of the same half-sky mirrored in the middle. This results in seeing constellations that shouldn't have been there at all in duplicate.)
- James Cameron replied: "Last time I checked, 'Titanic' sold $1.3 billion worth of tickets, worldwide. Imagine how many more tickets we would have sold if we'd gotten the sky right." But it was still corrected for the DVD.
- You Should Know This Already: The ship sinks and loads of people die.
- Also, the iceberg did it.
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