The sinking of the Titanic is a event that, with its horrific, escalating sequence of mistakes and massive loss of life, has captured the imagination of pretty much everyone who’s lived in the 101 years since it sank. Dramatisations, on the large and small screen, have played a big part in this, turning the tragedy into an emotionally unifying melodrama, without losing any of the tragic effect. Obviously James Cameron’s epic (and in many ways definitive) film version that swept the Oscars and the box office played a big part in that, but even before then, particularly in the decades directly following the disaster, there’s been a multitude of movies that have looked at Titanic in one way or another.
And why not? With the obvious class divide, present in both the ship’s design and pushed to the fore in its sinking, and Titanic herself serving as a symbol of Empire driven opulence there’s a myriad of subtexts to be mined. And once it became convention to have a fictional romance on board the ship be the main attraction (a notion introduced incredibly early on), screenplays began to write themselves.
Some, notably Cameron’s incredible effort and the meticulously researched A Night To Remember (Walter Lord spent 20 years collecting information for the book on which it’s based), ended up brilliant, but most fall in the category of interesting to fanatics, but vapid to general audiences. And then beyond them there’s the films on this list; the movies based around the Titanic tragedy so stupid they’d be written off as a joke if it wasn’t for the evidence sitting right in front of you. Strap yourselves in; this is going to be a bumpy one.
Honourable Mention – That Disrespectful Red Bull Advert
A couple of months ago Red Bull aired another in their series of crudely drawn, logically skewed adverts, this time claiming that the only reason so many of the passengers of the crew died when the Titanic went down was because there was no Red Bull on board and therefore no one had their wiiings . If you think it sounds too stupid to be true, check the video out below.
While there’s certainly an a argument that 101 years is enough time for most jokes to be acceptable, that doesn’t really stretch to the trivialisation of a catastrophic loss of life. It subsequently received 110 complaints from disgusted viewers, including descendants of those who died, but the ad remained on the air.
But hey, at least it understood that Captain Smith was ignorant of the dangers of sea travel, so it did do a bit better than some entries on this list.
The post 7 Dumb Films Based On The Titanic You Won’t Believe Got Made appeared first on WhatCulture!.
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