One of the often-debated theories among film critics is whether artistry can make up for the most extreme of subject matter. The 'extreme' being the degree to which a film can be seemingly tasteless or have a potential left of moral offense. It's a good enough theory, but a movie like "The Legend of the Titanic" really forces one to reconsider their perception on it. This could very well be the worst movie of its kind. Production-wise, it's just mediocre and flat, but its immoral and mindless attitude toward one of the most infamous disasters in human history strikes like a hammer blow to the head. Again and again and again.
The movie was made in Italy just a year after James Cameron's mega-blockbuster "Titanic" hit big screen there. With a film with that mush fiscal success, it was not surprise that an array of rip-offs and cinematic plunderers would appear on the horizon. But who would have ever imagined that a picture like "The Legend of the Titanic" would ever work. The movie is not live-action like Mr. Cameron's film or the marvelous 1950s picture "A Night to Remember." It is animated, sometimes with a computer, othertimes with a hand-drawn feel. Now this picture is charting itself into an ocean full of cinematic icebergs, but it is the way that the screenplay is written and the horrifyingly amoral ideas are played out that much it such an unredeemed fiasco.
Not only does it borrow heavily from James Cameron's film, but practically every Disney production featuring a talking animal over the last five decades. The central characters are not people aboard the RMS Titanic, but talking mice. According to a grandfather mouse who survived the sinking of the ship, the stories of 1500 people drowning in the icy waters of the North Atlantic was all a cover-up; that not a life was lost at all in 1912. Most of it is told in flashback (where'd that come from, huh?) and this introductory plot-flipper is just the first of four or five of the dumbest twists in cinematic history.
The biggest sin of the picture is the rewriting of a tragic event. The only possible thing that I can imagine was running through the screenwriters' heads was not to make a depressing, sad movie for children to see. But that goes back to my point that an animated movie about the Titanic disaster was an iffy premise to begin with. But even if we can forgive it for trying to make children forget that more than a thousand people lost their lives in a single night so many years ago, surely we cannot when it tries to develop a plot using dopey methods such as mice being infatuated with human females, dolphins that learn to talk when a human tear touches their nose (with a healthy dose of "magic moon-beams" attached), a chaste love story where the two lovers discover they're meant to be together after dancing for half a minute, and the inclusion of sharks and a giant octopus propelling an iceberg into the path of the ship. And when, for a second, it tries to treat the disaster head-on, the picture chooses to laugh it away in the very next scene. And it is not very far along before one realizes that it's far more concerned about protection of whales than it is about honoring a historical tragedy.
However, even if the RMS Titanic story was just a fairytale as this movie would like us to believe, "The Legend of the Titanic" would still be a disaster. That theory of redeeming subject matter requires artistry and there is none to be found. The animation is flat, uninspired, and marred with an interruption of hand-drawn images with computer-generated sweep-overs of the ship which I am certain were pulled from a Titanic documentary. The dubbing for the English-language print is dreadful. Voice work is flimsy and oftentimes a vocal will be heard when an animated character's mouth is clearly buttoned up.
It's almost as if "The Legend of the Titanic" wanted to infuriate and offend its audience. What's more horrifying is that lots of people went to see the movie in its home country and that it was followed by a loose remake, also about talking animals and the sinking of the ship, called "Titanic: The Legend Goes On..." a slightly better film (in both of its versions) but still insulting to history and the intelligence of the viewer. One thing many of us would like to do would be to sit in on a meeting where a project like this gets greenlit. Because I can't imagine why anybody thought that an animated movie about the sinking of the RMS Titanic was a good idea.
