I remember very clearly that for about six or seven hours, Titanic was the best-kept secret in the world.

As the release of James Cameron’s seventh feature film drew towards us in 1997, I had heard all the horror stories, seen the (rather irritatingly) vague trailer, read the Time Magazine article about the sinking ship and the man who was sinking it. Two hundred million dollars, all reputedly funneling down into a great, irreclaimable whirlpool: there was no way in hell this film would ever escape the excesses of its own production cost. Titanic, as a Hollywood property, was a done deal before it even arrived. Its iceberg was inevitable.

As a young, enthusiastic filmmaker, I’d followed Cameron’s career – hallmarked in most instances by his cruel, detail-obsessed directorial approach – over the course of 5½ films (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, and kinda Strange Days). Premiere Magazine had dubbed him “Iron Jim” in a 1994 article about the making of True Lies, and the name stuck to my skull like glue as a kind of mantra/mission statement for my own filmmaking enterprises. Iron Jim watched over me from the inside of my high school locker door, while I spent my teen years doing my best to emulate his brazen, cock-of-the-walk creative arrogance. I consumed information about him. I became aware that aside from his vicious on-set temperament and exhaustive attention to detail, Cameron was also a filmmaker of one other noteworthy distinction: he had never let me down. His films were infrequent, and an even greater rarity in that each one of them worked me over like a prizefighter. Iron Jim was money in the bank.

Nevertheless, Titanic seemed to be promising something different. It wasn’t a techno-gearhead adventure story; it was not a fetishization of steel, electricity, and cold blue light. Titanic – as proclaimed by Iron Jim himself – would be a “love story,” and not in the much more agreeable Ed Harris / Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio / drowning together at the bottom of the ocean sort of way. Titanic would be melodramatic. Titanic would be soft. Titanic would be… for girls.

Girls! Girls were not allowed in the Iron Jim Fan Club, with the possible exception of my sister, who liked that Kyle Reese fellow quite a lot. I still remember the feeling in my chest when I wandered into the HMV in downtown Toronto in early December of 1997, and flipped over the Titanic soundtrack CD, just released. There were the fourteen tracks by James Horner, as expected… but at the bottom lay the kicker. It was the ultimate kowtow to the prevailing style of the big Hollywood melodramas of the 1990s, the most loathed bit of end-credits confection. It would be Iron Jim’s final statement on all things Titanic: the Celine Dion song.

In that moment, I finally understood. I don’t mean that I jumped to the sort of conclusions that most people might have made when seeing a Celine Dion track attached to a movie – that Titanic would suck as much as Dion sucks. No, instead, I understood for the first time what Cameron was attempting to do with his film, and how far he was willing to go to do it. I remember thinking that Cameron probably had about as much use for Dion as a singer as I did, i.e. none. And yet, there she was, crowning his largest film to date, because that’s what you did with films like that. Whatever he’d been doing out there in the ocean for the past three years, Iron Jim wasn’t backing off. Fuck, when did he ever back off?

I was 21 years old that year. I was in love, with a whip-smart teenager who had the face of an angel, and the sneaky aspirations towards mayhem of the finest of Lucifer’s minions. I dragged the girl, who was reluctant as all getout, to the Eglinton Theatre at 12:15 in the afternoon on Friday, December 19th, 1997. She didn’t want to be there; didn’t think there was any way that Titanic could appeal to her, or me, or any of the other brave Cameroids who were standing in the light snow outside the theatre on that preternaturally clear winter’s day. Little did she know. Little did any of us. Titanic‘s success would come in trumping that very assumption: it did appeal, to all of us, and a whole lot more.

Titanic is three and a half hours log, and that first screening of it at the Eglinton was sparsely populated with the handful of people who had been willing to give it a try in spite of the overwhelmingly negative media hype surrounding the film. I remember the actual reviews in the paper that morning as having been uncommonly merciful, likely because of the drubbing Titanic had been receiving all year. It was assumed that the film was going to be the biggest flop in the history of Hollywood, so why not give it a break? This was only two years after Waterworld, after all.

Those same reviewers would issue stark about-faces months later, when Titanic became the success it ultimately became – whining that it wasn’t that good; that they had only been trying to be nice; that the world had gone crazy. On December 19th, though, none of that had happened yet. We left the theatre when the movie was over, and the only warnings of the tsunami that was building in the distance – you know the one, you saw it in Cameron’s The Abyss – were the exhilarated, slightly loopy, grins on the faces of the people who came out of the Eglinton that day.

Back at my house, my girlfriend and I fell asleep. A few hours later, dazed and half-lucid, wrapped up in each other, I offered her what would become my first rudimentary review of Titanic: “It felt like I was really there.”

Maybe I broke the silence too soon, or at just the right time, but it seemed like as soon as those words escaped my lips, the world caught on. Titanic never had the hundred-million-dollar opening weekend required of a blockbuster nowadays… but it never had the subsequent 60% dropoff, either. Titanic became the all-time box office champ in the most unassuming way possible in the post-Star Wars economy. It made thirty million dollars on its first weekend, and then, it did it again the following week. And again, the week after that; and again, and again, and again. And so, for about twelve or thirteen straight weeks, it seemed like everyone in the world was going to see Titanic at least once. Some of us were going to see it again, and again, and again.

Titanic‘s success as both a film and a box office phenomenon can be attributed to the simplest, and most elusive, of elements: it appeals to everyone. It is a cross-demo, cross-market construction, at a level of polish that hasn’t been seen out of Hollywood since the champs of the golden age: Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz (Cameron’s favourite film). Perhaps this is Titanic‘s biggest sin: it arrived fifty years too late. It harkens back to a time when you could have romance, drama, adventure, action, comedy, and even a dose of social history, all walled up together in a splendid, opulent box – and get away with it. When Titanic‘s march to glory – a couple billion bucks, and a dozen Oscars – had passed the point of the ridiculous, and its initial supporters turned on it in droves because its success had outweighed Titanic‘s presumed value, the first thing to go was any respect for Cameron’s deceptively clever screenplay. “Poorly written,” they said, and still say. “Horrible dialogue.” “Terrible story.”

Wrong. Of all the Academy Awards Titanic received – and lordy, it seemed to bag ’em all – the one that Titanic most deserved was the one it didn’t get, and wasn’t even nominated for: its screenplay. Cameron’s script for Titanic is a marvel. It’s the clockwork construction of a writer knowing exactly what he wants his film to achieve, and carefully piecing together all of the film’s elements – character, location, plot movement – into a combined whole that fully, and marvelously, exploits the premise.

So Cameron gives us fiery Rose Dewitt-Bukater (Kate Winslet, forever winning my heart), whose distance as an out-of-reach socialite quickly evaporates, once she’s attempting suicide on the back of the ship. In that moment, Rose reveals to every teenaged girl in the audience that the trappings may have changed, but the trap remains the same: being a girl sucks, whether the corsets are real or metaphorical (or both). We also get Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio, in that single instant when he went from up-and-comer to icon), an impossibly self-assured guide and guardian, who will take Rose by the hand and then coax, propel, and ultimately drag her to her own survival – and if she chooses it, freedom. Rose is a first-class female passenger; Jack is a steerage male. We don’t notice till well past the two hour mark, but our two principal characters are living emblems of the opposing poles of Titanic‘s apocalypse. Statistically speaking, her chances of survival were the best on the ship; his were the worst. And by the simple fact that Jack will never let go of Rose’s hand, we’re going to see exactly how much force will try to pull them apart.

Traveling with Jack and Rose is the film’s third most important character, Titanic herself. Early in the first reel, Cameron gives us a full virtual-reality tour of the ship’s sinking, a canny move. This frees the picture from ever having to tell us why things are happening ever again; we simply know where Jack and Rose need to be in order to survive. Over the ensuing two hours, right up until the prismatic sequence where the fateful iceberg finally comes into view and gives the starboard side of the ship a good smacking, Cameron supplements our bird’s-eye view of Titanic with on-the-ground experience. Somehow, in the course of their adventures, Jack and Rose wander through every single area of the great ship. This is far more than marvelous historical documentation (although, of course, under Cameron’s meticulous guidance, it becomes exactly that); it’s also simple foreshadowing of the disaster to come. From bow to stern, Titanic becomes a real world in a way that few film sets have before. “It felt like I was really there,” indeed. In the last hour of the film, we must suffer the ignominy of watching this beautiful sphere fall victim to its own great hubris.

Why do we keep jumping back to the present day, in the midst of a really entertaining period story? Why must every heartfelt moment between Jack and Rose on the prow of the ship give way to ghostly images of the real Titanic, sitting under two miles of frigid water in the middle of the North Atlantic? Can’t these two young lovers snog in peace without the phantom face of Gloria Stewart crowding into the image, to remind us that everything withers and decays? Well, no; for that reason, exactly. Cameron the writer never lets us become too comfortably mired in the fantasy of a happy ending on Titanic (that first jump out of the past, after over an hour of story, is an incredible jolt to the system); Cameron the director concocts linking imagery (observe Rose’s flowing skirt fading into nothingness in that first segue, from bow kiss to ghostly wreck) so melancholically beautiful that it haunts, and hurts, in a way that none of his work has done before.

We know it’s coming before it happens; can feel it in our gut with such visceral certainty that when the film’s great hinge-point finally does arrive (it comes at almost the exact chronological middle of the running time), and Murdoch is screaming “Hard-a-port!” at a chunk of ice that won’t move, we’re a nervous wreck – hoping against hope that somehow, this time, the trick will work, and the great ship will slide past its oppressor and keep on chugging into the perfect crystal night. It can’t, and it won’t, and it never will, but maybe Titanic‘s great success lies in that feeble desire. Maybe we all crowded back into the theatre again and again that winter to see if, this time, they changed the ending; to see if at last we would be allowed to enjoy the sumptuous love story and all its lusty joy, but forego the catastrophic visual pornography of watching a really big piece of metal sink forever under the waves while screaming masses cling to her last dry rails. But we can’t, of course, and neither could they, those 1500 people in 1912; and therein lies the point. An obvious point, perhaps, but a good one.

So the inevitability of it all becomes overwhelming – I still get chills on an early, quiet shot of the bow of the ship sinking beneath the surface for the first time, never to return to daylight – and when push comes to shove, Cameron’s older, more familiar capabilities come out in spades: nobody does big, bold, action quite as well as this guy. The final sucker-punch, then, is what he does after; after the fastidious FX shots of the great liner splitting in half and crashing back down into the water, killing hundreds of people in an instant; after the elevator ride to hell that consumes the stern of the ship in its final moments. After all the screaming and wailing and dying: a single scene, lit by starlight, between two frozen people on a single piece of wood. That single moment, once Jack is gone, when Rose must decide between easy death and a ferociously difficult life. It only takes her a moment.

There was something perfect about being in love that year; not just in love, but young and in love, my girlfriend and I a pair of hell-chasing Jack and Roses our own selves… even if such things, like Jack and Rose, are never meant to last. A lot of people since 1997 have dismissed my love of Titanic as the foolish by-product of the circumstances in which the film entered my life, my own romantic glow combining with the film’s to form something mythic. They are both completely right, and completely wrong. While it’s true that Titanic will never be the same for me as it was that year – too many wounds, too much of the crustification that comes with the dulling effects of getting older – there’s still no accounting for the way in which the film still sees me off to sleep on a few cold, clear winter nights, nor how it sails with me in my dreams. At the end of the film, Rose lies in her bed, dreaming or dying, and is carried once more to the arms of her lover and the great ship that can never exist again. This is the gift that Titanic gives me, every time I watch it: it reminds me of what I love, and why I love it, and how lucky I am to be alive in a world where such marvels are possible.