23 years have passed since its premiere, and Titanic is still the most famous film of all time. The audience follows its news with interest in the Arab and international world. andThe matter does not stop only at the passion for the film and its heroes, but also for the story itself. The ship is still a mystery that joins the Bermuda Triangle in a series of mysteries that do not yet find a logical explanation on our planet. The film is inspired by a true story that revolves around the catastrophic sinking of the Titanic – an engineering miracle of its time – in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was an integrated city running on water, and was built to accommodate more than 3,500 passengers. It was the talk of the world at the time until it was called “The Unsinkable Ship,” but it remained the talk of the world throughout the ages, but this time because it sank and took 1,500 passengers with it to the depths of the ocean, on its first sailing, on the evening of Wednesday, April 14, 1912.
Her first, and last, trip!
On April 10, 1912, the RMS Titanic sailed at full speed, on its maiden voyage, from the port of Southampton in England, to cross the Atlantic Ocean towards New York. It was designed by the Irish ship company William Pirrie, and built in Belfast. It was believed to be the fastest ship in the world and the largest moving object built by man throughout the ages. The ship was divided internally into 16 watertight compartments. If 4 of those compartments were flooded with water, there would be no losses to the ship, but 5 days after its launch, the ship sank due to its collision with an iceberg. Which claimed the lives of approximately 1,517 victims, in addition to losses estimated in 2000 at 200 million pounds sterling.
How did the film document the incident?
The movie Titanic, directed by James Cameron, takes place on board the famous ship, where the poor artist Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the aristocratic Rose (Kate Winslet) fall in love with each other, before their story ends with Jack’s death and Rose’s survival. In this presentation, we will make a comparison between the real events that took place during the sinking of the ship in the year 1912, and the events of the film that was shown in November 1997.
Fake people
First of all, Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater (the heroes of the work) were not real people, but rather they were completely fictional characters. Director and screenwriter James Cameron created the character Rose, who has nothing to do with the history of the Titanic, and even the love story between her and Jack is fictional. Also, another group of the film’s characters, related to the two leads, are also fictional; Perhaps the most notable are Rose’s fiancé (Billy Zane), her mother Ruth (Frances Fisher), and the third-class passengers, especially Jack’s friends Fabrizio and Tommy. Although there was indeed a passenger on the ship named J. Dawson, but the letter C here belongs to Joseph, not Jack. Joseph was a member of the Titanic’s crew, and he worked as a coal trimmer, and one of his most prominent tasks was removing piles of coal that had been swept into the ship’s engines. It is funny that director James Cameron later stated that he was not aware of the presence of a person named Joseph Dawson on the ship, until after the film was finished. Another irony is that Jack’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) Irish friend Tommy Ryan (Jason Barry), a character invented by director Cameron, turns out, according to the ship’s data, that there is a person named Thomas Ryan (27 years old) who was a guest on the third deck of the ship. But his body was never identified.
Real shots
Most of the underwater footage is from the real Titanic wreck. In 1995, James Cameron chartered the Russian ship Akademik Mstislav Keldysh and its two submarines. During filming, he made a total of 12 dives to film special footage of the shipwreck, 12,000 feet below the North Atlantic Ocean. For this purpose, special cameras and equipment have been designed that can handle large volumes per square inch of water pressure. Each dive (or dive) lasted approximately 15 hours, but the cameras were able to store only 12 minutes of each dive. As a result, a few underwater shots had to be faked.
Historical fallacies
It is rumored that one of the paintings of the world-renowned painter Pablo Picasso was lost when the ship sank, but the truth is that this is not confirmed at all, even though the film was shown after Rose boarded (suppressed Winslet) on board the ship, which will display original paintings by Picasso, and the comments on the paintings came out with amazement as if the painter was very famous, but Picasso was barely known at the time, so where did this great fascination come from? Also, after the film was released, the relatives of Officer William Murdoch, who appeared in the film committing suicide after shooting two passengers who were heading towards a lifeboat while the ship sank, became angry. Angry gatherings took place in his hometown of Dalbeattie, Scotland. However, based on some witnesses, historians are absolutely certain that one of the ship’s officers committed suicide, but it cannot be confirmed that it was Officer Murdoch, and there is no evidence to indicate that Murdoch had received a bribe at that time, as shown in the film.
Shipwreck puzzle
After the film was released, controversy arose over the plausibility of the ship’s sinking as depicted in the film. Some analysts considered that the division that occurred in the depiction of the work was not realistically possible, although some surviving witnesses confirmed that it was indeed destroyed. But in 1985, these speculations were put to an end, when the wreckage of the Titanic was found in two separate parts at the bottom of the sea. It is very likely that the ship was destroyed to the same degree as we saw in the movie.
A team of champion musicians
After the ship collided with an iceberg, Wallace Henry Hartley (33 years old) was collected. andHe is a violinist and was the leader of the ship’s band. The band consisted of 8 members and they ended up on the deck of a boat near one of the ship’s entrances. There they played music. The survivors later mentioned that the band was playing In The Shadows and other songs, but no one mentioned what the last song was playing when the ship sank completely. Some newspapers later stated it was Nearer, My God, to Thee, but some survivors said it was Song d’Automne. All members of the band died as the ship sank. Wallace Hartley’s body was recovered on May 4, 1912, by the ship Mackay-Bennett. Thousands of citizens lined up as his funeral procession passed through the city of Cologne in the English state of Lancashire.
Great celebration
The movie Titanic won many international awards, including 11 Oscars. The Oscars are for Best Picture, won by James Cameron and Jon Landau, Best Director and Best Original Score, won by James Horner, Best Cinematography, for Russell Carpenter, Best Visual Effects, for Robert Legato, Best Costume Design, for Debra Lynn Scott, and Best Sound Editing, for Christopher Boyes. The film also won the Best Editing Award for Conrad Pugh, James Cameron, and Richard A. Harris, the Best Sound Mixing Award for Gary Summers, Tom Johnson, Mark Iolano, and Gary Redstraw, the Best Original Song Award for James Horner, and the Best Production Design Award for Peter Lamont and Michelle Ford. Certainly, if you follow cinema films, you will not see a single film in your life that has won all these awards at the Oscars festival except Titanic, and you will not find a film that has achieved the top spot in everything since its first showing over the course of 23 years, despite the enormous potential in the stock of modern films, which has not yet enabled any film to catch up with this artistic giant.
