Review of Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) by Edith N — 18 Dec 2008

I haven't seen [i]Titanic[/i] and I don't intend to. There. I said it. And the thing is, when it came out, I was about its perfect demographic. I would have been, what, 22? Supposedly, I should have been swooning over Leonardo DiCaprio. I should have been wanting to be Kate Winslet. (Now, Kate Winslet being pursued by Johnny Depp--that would've been something!) I was supposed to be all caught up in the drama and all. Women my age were seeing the movie over and over again. And I? Not interested. Still not interested. And if I [i]were[/i] going to watch it, which I'm not, I'd probably be cheering on Billy Zane, whom I love. Even though I'm given to understand that he's a bit of a mustache twirler in this.

James Cameron, who's clearly a bit of an obsessive, has descended to the ocean floor again to look over the ruins of the [i]Titanic[/i]. For some obscure reason, he has chosen to bring along Bill Paxton. Sure, he'd been in the movie, and he showed himself able to track tornadoes shortly before that, and before that he traveled in space, but I'm still not sure he's the guy I'd want to be performing, you know, [i]real world exploration.[/i] It could be just me, but I'd want experts. Scientists, possibly. Certainly guys whose experience did not involve pretending to know what they were doing. Then again, James Cameron's experience largely involves getting other people to pretend to know what they're doing, so there we are.

Maybe I would have liked this more if I actually cared about the [i]Titanic[/i]. I simply don't. They mention early on that they could be spending the same amount of effort looking at ships like the [i]Lusitania[/i], but they kind of brush that off. It's a shame. The thing is, I think there's something to be [i]learned[/i] from looking at the [i]Lusitania[/i]. We might finally be able to solve the question as to whether it was destroyed because it was carrying munitions. That's a genuine historical question. I believe the ruins of the [i]Maine[/i] are still in Havana harbour, though I suppose that'd get into complicated politics. The point is, I can see a lot of things more beneficial to the greater scope of human understanding than just looking at the [i]Titanic[/i] over and over again.

Besides that, there's a lot of chintzy computer animation of the little probe thingies going into the ship itself, and the hokey overlays of what I can only assume is footage from the movie. Maybe it's only in the extended DVD cut, but I find myself doubting that. I'm not a big fan of Cameron as a director, frankly, and it strikes me as the sort of thing he'd want to put in so it could seem more impressive. And, to me, it didn't. Sorry, James Cameron. I understand that he wanted to get us into his own passion for the events of that cold night. I do. I understand the intent of the movie just fine. I'm just saying that it didn't work for me.

Normally, I don't make the "money could be spent elsewhere" argument. Gods know that James Cameron has the money to burn, and he's certainly allowed to spend that money as he likes. However, I think the obsession that our society has with the [i]Titanic[/i] is frankly weird. I'm not okay with relics being brought up from the ocean floor, because I think it gives the obsessives that much more to focus on, and because I think it's grave robbing. But I think Cameron is doing his own trading on the dead, though I doubt he sees it that way. Imagine the good he could be doing if he spent his money on something that wasn't studied all to pieces.