‘Titanic’: these were the two and four star reviews that FOTOGRAMAS published 25 years ago

On the occasion of the special that FOTOGRAMAS is celebrating for the 25th anniversary of the theatrical release of ‘Titanic’, and in which we have already recovered a filming diary written by James Cameron and two interviews with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, now our magazine is resurrected from its historic newspaper library the two reviews that were published in number 1,852 of February 1998 where they faced each other, in a controversy of the month (a format in which two critics showed two opposite visions of a film), the reviews by Jordi Batlle Caminal and Daniel Monzón, who, before directing feature films such as ‘Cell 211’ (2009), ‘El niño’ (2014) or ‘The laws of the border’ (2021), he was a journalist and collaborator in FOTOGRAMAS.

And it was precisely Daniel Monzón himself who, after accepting our invitation to participate in the special for the 25th anniversary of ‘Titanic’, he wanted to reread the review he wrote for FOTOGRAMAS in 1998 (I hadn’t done it until now), review it and assess what I thought about the James Cameron film at that time: “I just reread it, because I didn’t remember what I had written, and it didn’t make it so bad”, he comments with a laugh Monsoon. “But I was disappointed because James Cameron, wanting to make this melodrama with the air of a big movie, had lost that playfulness that characterized previous films of his that are fantastic like ‘Terminator’, ‘Terminator 2’, ‘Abyss’ or ‘Lies’. Risky Games’, which was a hilarious and highly entertaining toy. You can see their comments and statements in full in the video at the top of this article. Will you still think the same as what you wrote in your review?

Below, you can read the two reviews of ‘Titanic’ written by Daniel Monzón and Jordi Batlle Caminal that FOTOGRAMAS published 25 years ago:

Review of Daniel Monzón

Among the virtues of ‘Titanic’, in addition to the foreseeable spectacularity of witnessing the conversion of hundreds of millions of dollars into wet paper over three reasonably enjoyable hours, is that of not compromising a lunatic blockbuster to the taste of the minority. Hence the love story on which the tome is based is raised in topical terms whose obviousness, simplicity, ingenuity and lack of risk can connect directly and interchangeably with all kinds of audiences.

With ‘Titanic’, the megalomaniac Cameron confesses that he tried to make his own ‘Gone with the Wind’, leave behind his (exciting) childhood stage and mature, so that they respect him as an artist and shower him with Oscars, just like they did Spielberg and Zemeckis, who have also become boring. He is in the right of him, but the problem is that The famous soap opera to which it aspires to be compared had a complex romantic background, adult and torturous up to the underlying sadomasochism. Something that ‘Titanic’ lacks, as much as it has plenty of airs…

Criticism of Jordi Batlle Caminal

Edward G. Robinson died happily in ‘When fate overtakes us’: contemplating -on a gigantic screen before which Charlton Heston’s astonished eyes also surrendered- a wonderful world of pure nature, already extinct in the fiction of that Fleischer’s futuristic fable. That virgin and luminous landscape was comparable to that of another previous film by Robinson, the sweet, music-loving, melodic ‘Song of Norway’, which we saw in its day -with our eyes so wide open- on the great canvas of Cinerama.

Many chicks today will be worth a Peru to see ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘Face to Face’ or ‘Alien: Resurrection’ on video, but for those of us who still have a pinrel in other times -and despite this we lovingly recorded and collected De Palma, Woo and Jeunet: it is one thing to be a chariot and quite another to be a donkey- it generates as much satisfaction as the contemplation of megalomaniac, Cecilbedemilian productions on the biggest screens ever counted.

The serious thing about the case is not that there are no longer macro screens, it is that there are no more DeMilles. Except Spielberg, of course. the big oneand Cameron now with the best disaster movie ever madeanacóndica as the canons dictate, unexpectedly lacaviana (or a comedy of rich and poor in the tradition of ‘The girl from Fifth Avenue’), technically hyper-revolutionary and epic (like ‘The Conquest of the West’, like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’) from stem to stern, so, so epic that one leaves the cinema with the sadness of knowing that he will never live (and die) an adventure as romantic as the one narrated. But with the joy of having recovered an increasingly less frequent sensation (and one that ‘The English Patient’ was not contagious): that of the cinema-show in a hyperbolic state.