James Cameron has reached bottom of the Ocean

If these new generation of modern Gentlman Adventurers have kids following in their footsteps, we'll be seeing a lot of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft Expys.

edited 28th Mar '12 9:37:35 AM by Natasel

I'm not quite sure if "hookers and blow" lifestyles are really much safer than being a Gentleman Adventurer...

I heard he also brought 3D cameras. Because, he's James Cameron.

This is awesome and gives me real respect for the man as a director for him to go that far for his research. Even though I never watched Titanic because I'm not too much into romances, I did end up watching Aliens and Avatar which he also directed and generally liked both movies.

edited 1st Apr '12 5:59:04 PM by GameGuruGG

Relevant: http://xkcd.com/1040/large/

That is an awesome map.

James Cameron and research? Oh rly? Not when one considers what he did to the memory of the Titanic's First Officer, a Scotsman named William Murdoch. Who that slimy bastard depicts in the movie as losing the plot in dealing with the aftermath of the collision with the iceberg and eventually committing suicide. And even when he was called out on it, he had the cheek to keep that scene in the movie. A five thousand pound donation to the Murdoch Memorial Prize Fund was, in my opinion and that of many of my fellow Scots, scant recompense for the way that the man was portrayed in the film.

A movie depicting someone negatively. News at 11.

The fact is we don't know exactly what happened and we do know that the upper class was given priority for boarding the boats and that they lied about it later, but it is resoundingly demonstrated when you look at the wealth of the survivors.

edited 19th Apr '12 4:29:41 PM by Vehudur

I haven't done much research on the Titanic, but do note that people who can report what happened are the ones who survived, and so they will remember fondly of those who contributed to their rescue and none of the things that their rescuers did wrong.

I'm pretty sure that if we can somehow interview those who died we will get a very different picture.

Well, funnily enough, it did make the news here. Which is why I remembered it. And the controversy stirred up. And if you want to point fingers at why more people died during the disaster, point them at Charles Lightoller. The Third Officer. Who sent boats away when they were half full because of his failure to step outside his self-imposed programming that it wasn't just women and children first, it was women and children only as far as he was concerned. Objective fact. It didn't matter to him the social class of the person who wanted on the life boat. It was the sex. And, funnily enough, he survived to tell his version and become a hero, portrayed by Kenneth More in the Fifties version of the story.

Unlike Murdoch.

Far as I'm concerned, the entire leadership of the Titanic fucked up that entire thing. ALL OF THEM. For God's sake, how do you miss a fucking ice berg big enough to tear a hole that size in the damned ship?

Cameron actually does acknowledge that he made a mistake in his depiction of Murdoch in the commentary of the DVD version that I have.

He says, or this is how I remember it, that he wanted to have most of the staff of the ship as named, real characters, with the actors knowing what was known of the people in question.

The character of Murdoch was originally going to be a fictional or nameless one, but at some point in the script that template became Murdoch, at which point (IIRC) the shooting and the suicide were removed. They were later included in the script, and Cameron had reservations about it but he thought that people would accept dramatisation of real people if he displayed them as humans who are under extreme stress. The letters he got for it were evidence enough that he should've gone back to a nameless character.

I don't see how that's a case of not doing the research, though, as the last moments of Murdoch are not known. Of course, I agree that it would have been a better idea to have the character who breaks down be nameless, but Murdoch's character was (IIRC) established enough that there's a larger emotional impact of him breaking down than there would have been of a never-seen-before character.

In any case, Cameron did very extensive research for the film, including having four historians who specialise in different aspects of the period and Titanic on set and involved in every part of the planning of the film. Of course, Cameron himself was already a Titanic enthusiast by the time he dived to the wreck the first time, before he started thinking about making the film.

I don't think that taking creative liberties with one historical character is necessarily evidence of a fundamental lack of research. Sometimes, you have to think of the story first.

Still, as I said, Murdoch should have been replaced with a nameless character.

The competence of the command staff in their usual duties wasn't the issue. It was how competent they were when the ship hit the iceberg that was. Or even before that. As some, though not all to be sure, naval historians have stated that if they had not tried to do radical manouvres in the limited time they had on getting the "Iceberg Right Ahead" warning and thus had the side of the hull ripped below the waterline but instead had hit the iceberg head on, the ship may not have sunk in the first place.

It's also surprisingly easy to miss things when you're the only bright thing around.

To be fair, though. the Californian has to take some responsibility for the disaster as well.

Well, first of all, the binoculars that were supposed to be in the crow's nest had been lost while the ship was in Liverpool. The spare was in a locked box, the key to which had also been lost.

The iceberg wasn't particularly big, but there were a lot of them about, and they were much further South than they usually were at that time of year. The crew of the ship knew about this, as they had received warnings from other ships, but once the captain was told once, no more messages about it were relayed to him; he was hosting a party, and the threat wasn't considered as major as it turned out to be.

The ship was very slow to turn because of the sheer scale of the ship compared to the performance of contemporary engineering. In addition, it was going faster than it should have been, allegedly because the ship's owner, who was on board, had told the captain that he'd make very positive headlines if he arrived in New York much sooner than expected, which would've been a nice end to the retiring captain's career.

Finally, the hole that was torn in the ship wasn't very big at all. The metal bent, which caused some of the rivets to snap and pop out. Because of this, the metal plates were separated, but the total area of all the gaps was hardly enough for one adult human to pass through, and that's all the gaps put together.

Well, since the only command staff personnel that night that did precisely what they should have done to preserve the lives of their passengers and crew were that of the Californian, I don't see what your point is? Who sent iceberg warnings that the wireless operator of the Titanic ignored? Cyril Furmstone Evans - wireless operator of the Californian.

There was a good BBC documentary on last week, exploding that myth and many others perpetuated by folklorists in blue uniform. Part of the Timewatch strand, I think

edited to add. Oh, I was right, and it is on Youtube too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3GH3y4Vyck

edited 19th Apr '12 5:05:19 PM by TamH70

The biggest ship ever and they couldn't be bothered to have more than two sets of binoculars and one set of keys to the box? >-0

Yeah, I think that really does convey a kind of attitude. If I had been on that ship in any kind of official position, I would've gone and broken the cabinet. Having binoculars is easily worth the bill you might be sent for the broken property of the White Star Line.

People with that kind of brains were in steerage, best of. Which would mean both ye and me would both have been in the worse case scenario. 8-)

That's very true.

I recently bought this special edition of a Finnish newspaper (well, I hesitate to call it that... It's a tabloid paper that enjoys scandal, but anyway,) and that special edition was about the Titanic and especially the Finnish people on board.

There was one memorial advertisement by a Finnish man who lost his wife and his 8 children (the family was going to live with a relative in the US while the father would cross the ocean later) which said something like "my family was murdered by capitalism."

....No, wait, this thread was about Cameron's recent dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, not about Titanic.

edited 19th Apr '12 6:06:12 PM by BestOf

I think talking about the Titanic in the same thread as anything Cameron does is pretty much not a derail, but a dead cert. Anything he does will inevitably loop back to the film and then to the real thing. It just his Godwin's Law...

And, well... he is under water. Bound to happen. Even more likely than whiskery, toothy fish that light up, even.

That's what I'd say too. He is so solidly linked to the ship that any discussion involving him must also involve the ship.

It's kind of weird to think of Cameron as the guy who did Titanic and Aliens and Avatar. I mean, that's quite a genre leap there.

So wait, someone said he hadn't quite done this yet. Is he still in the preparation stage for this or what? Also, will a new movie about the horrors of the ocean come from this?

He has already done the dive. Last week or the week before, Jimmy came knocking knocking at my door, or at least it was all over the news coverage like a rash.