(Credit: Netflix)

There’s unlikely to be a movie out there that’s had more superlatives thrown at it than James Cameron’s 1997 epic disaster-romance Titanic has during the past two decades. Although “high-grossing”, “most expensive” and “most heartbreaking” have to compete with “most overblown”, “most absurd” and “most melodramatic”. In short, it’s a bit of a divisive watch.

The film was an unprecedented cinematic achievement at the time of its release, no question. And it set its two leads, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, up for storied Hollywood careers. But many viewers have never gotten over the sheer self-importance permeating much of its 195 minutes. Not least, the movie’s frankly ridiculous ending, in which the young aristocrat Rose DeWitt Bukater leaves her destitute lover Jack Dawson to sink into the Arctic Ocean.

Rose should have been one of the first to take advantage of the lifeboats in short supply on the titular ocean liner as it sank, given her social standing and the prioritisation of saving women and children. Yet she abandons her chance at safety to reunite with the lower-priority Jack, and the two are plunged into the icy water together as the ship goes down. Jack then saves her life by pushing her onto a wooden panel which has broken off the ship’s deck and happens to be floating on the water’s surface.

Jack himself, meanwhile, stays in the sea and dies of hypothermia. Rose tells him, “I’ll never let go, I promise,” in reference to an earlier scene in the movie where Jack prevents her from falling from the rails of the ship’s deck. She then lets go of him immediately, allowing his body to disappear into the dark ocean void.

Could Jack have survived?

In some ways, the personal tragedy of Rose losing Jack at the film’s climax serves to emphasise the class disparities at the heart of the real Titanic’s evacuation and rescue operation. Still, the way his death comes about is excruciatingly maudlin, substituting genuine social commentary for weepy teen heartbreak.

And tests the suspension of our disbelief to breaking point. Why can’t Jack just climb onto the makeshift raft with Rose? Does he really have to die? And even once he’s dead, why does she have to let his corpse sink to the bottom of the ocean?

These questions have plagued Cameron’s film for years, to the extent that the director himself felt compelled to conduct a scientific experiment to prove the viability of this plotline. The result? Jack could have been saved, especially if Rose had offered to use her life jacket. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be in her character, as a woman born into wealth, to have thought of such an altruistic act. Maybe it wasn’t in Jack’s character to accept it.

In any case, the manner of Jack’s demise maximises melodrama and proves to us that in 1912 the lower classes weren’t worth saving, as far as the upper stratum of society was concerned. But it does so at the expense of realism and real dramatic tension.