If any movie is the king of James Cameron’s world, I think it's Titanic. While some claim his legacy is the Avatar franchise, with its latest installment Avatar: Fire and Ash currently in theaters, I respectfully disagree. That's because, no matter what movie the Aliens director promotes, he is almost always asked about Titanic, and one infamous door scene in particular. You know the one. Cameron recently dropped an F-bomb while expressing his exhaustion with the debate over Titanic’s raft scene (but I still have my doubts after his most recent rant).
Could Jack have fit on the door with Rose? It’s a question that has plagued Hollywood for decades. Titanic stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have both been asked to answer the question in its resurgence, and of course, the Avatar director has been grilled on it a billion times. Even after he ran a series of scientific experiments to prove Jack couldn’t survive, people continued to question him. Now, he’s trying to squash the debate once and for all on The Hollywood Reporter’s Award Chatter Podcast with an expletive to add some extra umph to his argument:
Don’t ask me about the fucking raft, people! Look, we even went to the lengths of doing an experiment to see if Jack could have in any way survived, or if they could have both survived, and people didn’t even hear the answer when I told them the answer: the answer is, if Jack somehow was an expert in hypothermia and somehow knew what science now knows back in 1912, it is theoretically possible, with a lot of luck, that he might have survived.
It’s true, after performing all those scientific scenarios with stunt doubles, Cameron and co. admitted there was a small chance Jack could have survived if they had both sat on the raft, out of the water, instead of Rose lying down. But as Cameron points out, Jack wasn’t exactly a scientific trailblazer:
So therefore, the answer is no, he could not have. There’s no way. The conditions were not met. He couldn’t have known those things.
The Terminator director has previously said it wouldn’t matter anyway if Jack could fit on the door or not. In the end, Rose did have to let go–Jack had to die. While Jack and Rose may be fictional characters, the tragic end to their story was very real for the majority of the passengers on the Titanic. Without his heroic death, you render the movie “meaningless,” as Cameron puts it.
So I understand his frustration, I do. The continued debate of the raft is kind of a middle finger to his whole movie–just proving year after year that people are missing the point entirely. However, I think he might just need to give in and play along. I personally think it’s a tired debate. At this point, though, I think some people are just bringing it up to get a rise out of him.
The True Lies filmmaker can drop as many F-bombs as he likes, unfortunately for him, I don’t believe this debate will ever die. It’s a classic conversation starter at parties, among friends, and even on game shows. The problem doesn’t lie in the science, it lies in the fact that people like Margot Robbie don’t like to watch its sad, tragic ending. Which is totally fine, but James Cameron doesn’t want to hear it anymore, guys! Seriously, maybe we should just let him make his upcoming projects in peace.
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