This movie belongs at the bottom of the ocean next to the “unsinkable” boat it’s titled after. I, unpopularly, dislike this movie with a burning passion for its multiple historical, and factual inaccuracies.

I was not alive when the movie came out, so I have absolutely no recollection of whether the Titanic sinking was relevant to society before this movie, but it sure as hell became a phenomenon after the movie.

The film follows a poor boy named Jack, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, and a woman named Rose, played by Kate Winslett, and the love story between the two. Jack is poor Rose is rich, rose is sad, jack is happy, you get the gist…

They fall in love because, like any love story, they have to for the plot to progress. At the end of the film, the Titanic sinks, at least Spielberg got that one right, and Jack has to die for Rose to live and retell her story to men excavating the ship in the far distant future once we were able to finally find the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean.

I vividly remember watching this film when I was little and being petrified by it. I have a deep fear of the ocean and anything/everything that inhabits it, so this movie is my absolute worst nightmare.

That being said, if Steven Spielberg is going to recreate my nightmare, I would like for it to be historically/factually correct.
One of the most famous inaccuracies of the film is the stars in the sky as Jack freezes to death. Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, the murderer of Pluto, famously critiqued this portion of the film, saying that we scientifically know what the night sky would have looked like on the night of the Titanic’s sinking. Why did Spielberg not choose to portray this?
Besides this minor inaccuracy in my opinion the film also has several other flaws.

The first is that The lake that Jack told Rose he went ice fishing on when she was threatening to jump is Lake Wissota, a man-made lake in Wisconsin near where Jack grew up. The lake was only filled with water in 1918 when a power company built a dam on the Chippewa River, six years after the Titanic sank.

Another is that Rose mentions Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s ideas on the male preoccupation with size to Bruce. However the Titanic sunk in 1912, and Freud did not publish the work relating to this until 1920 in “Beyond The Pleasure Principle.” Also, up until 1919, Freud relied solely on data from women.

Although small, these were simple fact searches that the film’s writers could have researched to be 1% more factually correct. I cannot overlook so many historical inaccuracies to force myself to like this romantic travesty.

Finally, Jack could have fit on that piece of driftwood very easily. It is hard to believe that the creators of the film could have plausibly watched that scene through and not seen any problem with the way Jack dies.

This film is ridiculous and doesn’t belong anywhere near the likes of Casablanca, Forrest Gump, and Blade Runner, yet it finds itself on AFI’s top 100.

Titanic is, at best, an overrated average romantic historical fiction film that fails miserably in its retelling of the sinking of the Titanic.