"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. If you don't adjust for inflation, it's the highest-grossing movie ever and unlikely to be unseated anytime soon. Currently, the film is, due to both it 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 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.
Launched the A-list careers of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
This film provides examples of:
- Auto Erotica (A thousand beds on board, and they consummate their love in the back of a car?)
- To be fair, sex in the back seat of a car would be quite a novelty in 1912.
- Award Snub (Kate Winslet)
- Leo didn't even get a nomination.
- 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."
- Badass (Well, in this tropers', opinion, the band members certainly deserve this, at least.)
- Did Not Do The Research (Remember how Jack said he used to go to Lake Wissota? Well it was man-made. I bet you know where this is going
.)
- Disposable Fiancé (Cal)
- Downer Ending (for most of the people on the ship of course)
- 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 Hater: It's widely assumed that most of the filmgoers were dumb pre-teens obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio.
- 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?!"
- Fake American (Kate Winslet as Rose De Witt Buttaker)
- 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.)
- Gorgeous Period Dress (for the first class, at least)
- Her Heart Will Go On (Trope Namer)
- 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.)
- 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)
- 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.)
- Love It Or Hate It (Possibly one of the most decisive examples in movie history)
- Love Triangle (Jack, Rose and Cal)
- Melodrama, some would argue
- 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)
- Older Than They Think (At least this troper has met some guy before that complained of how much scenes were "ripped off" from A Night to Remember, ignoring completely that both films depict the same historical event, and that those scenes happened in Real Life)
- 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, or that there wasn't a single black in the entire movie, 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)
- Absolutely not true with respect to the minorities. There were blacks and Asians aboard Titanic: the black passengers died, but many of the Asian passengers survived.
- Rich Suitor Poor Suitor: Jack vs. Cal
- Romantic Plot Tumor (A common criticism, but having Jack and Rose come from two different worlds also meant a greater breadth of the ship and the people could be covered, that would have required a lot of B plots to do otherwise.)
- Screw The Money I Have Rules (Take That, Cal!)
- She Cleans Up Nicely (Applies more to Jack, but there you go.)
- Shout Out (Rose mentions the 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.)
- Star Crossed Lovers (Jack and Rose)
- Strongly Worded Letter
- Tear Jerker (Such as 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.)
- That Man 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.
- Yandere: Cal, to an extent.
- 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.)
- You Should Know This Already: The ship sinks and loads of people die.
