| James Cameron’s new film, Ghosts of the Abyss, seems like an attempt to make up for what he got wrong in Titanic – but it doesn’t achieve that at all.
The 3D IMAX film, rife with references to 9/11, which happened around the time his crew was filming this deep-sea documentary about the Titanic, is so horribly tainted with American egocentricity and Hollywood sentimentality that it’s hard to tell what the Canadian-born Cameron was trying to say about the shipwrecked oceanliner.
On his expedition, Cameron brings with him a huge contingent of scientists, historians and oceanographers, but devotes 90 per cent of his time to tag-along celebrity Bill Paxton, whose unscripted submarine dialogue is as banal as it is simplistic and irrelevant, and shots of the two anthropomorphized deep-sea remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), "Elwood" and "Jake."
The other 10 per cent of the film is taken up with interior shots of the rotting, mostly unimpressive ocean tomb, and rapid blurbs from interesting but almost entirely ignored specialists. One biologist who was studying "rusticles," colonies of bacteria that are gradually devouring the wood and steel of the Titanic, got less than 20 words of dialogue in this 64-minute film – she was lucky.
When the film crew finds that there’s been a terrorist attack on New York, inane links to the Titanic are made, almost to the point of associating the Taliban to a huge iceberg on the oceans of world peace. A flying iceberg? Hijacked by… um… penguins?
Cameron’s use of computer-generated overlays to add context to Titanic’s fairly deteriorated bulk is noteworthy, though. What looks like a dark cavern half-filled with mud is restored to its 1912 form, complete with living, moving characters to emphasize that this ghostly hulk was created and inhabited by humans.
The Titanic, a British ship piloted by a British captain through international and Canadian waters, never touched American soil and had little to do with the U.S. The way Cameron tells the "story," it’s as if the Titanic was Teddy Roosevelt’s hat for 10 years before it set sail from Britain, and that it was brought down by terrorism.
Sadly for Cameron, people already know that neither is true. |
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