The movie is set almost entirely aboard the Titanic, barring a brief couple scenes in port, and the framing device set on a research boat in the present day.
The Titanic is realized in excellent detail. The sets, costumes, special effects are all exceptionally well done.
Most of the runtime of the film is dedicated to a teenage love story between Kate Winslet’s Rose and Leonardo DeCaprio’s Jack. Honestly I think it holds up. It drags a bit here and there (spitting lessons?!) but if Romeo and Juliet is a great love story, Titanic is fantastic.
The sinking sequence holds up amazingly well. The set pieces are of extremely high quality and bring the disaster to life in ways only James “puckered asshole” Cameron can. Life-size sets that actually flooded and tilted, miniatures, and a restrained use of CGI come together beautifully.
The choice to set this fictional love story into this historic disaster setting is perhaps somewhat dubious.
The soundtrack, especially Celine Dion’s utter caterwaul of the title theme can be a bit much, and was severely overplayed in the years following the movie’s release.
The giant blue diamond was a pointless macguffin that failed to pay off. It was given(?) to her by her fiance that she hates, she decided to have her portrait drawn in the nude wearing the diamond for some reason, retrieving the diamond from the coat the fiance had put on her was the reason why the psychotic guy was shooting at them, she only realized she had it when aboard the rescue ship, and then she throws it overboard at the end…for some reason. Audiences reacted pretty poorly to the thing, didn’t stop them from merchandising it.
Overall a pretty well-crafted movie with some questionable choices, made by a canker sore of a person.