Based on the Clive Cussler best-selling novel, Raise the Titanic is an exciting Cold War thriller. While tracking down a shipment of a rare mineral with military potential, retired Navy captain Dirk Pitt discovers that it was lost in the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, leading him to propose the impossible…Raise the Titanic. It’s a fairly interesting story that’s full of mystery and intrigue; especially given that this fictional account of Titanic’s discover and raising was written before the real-life discovery in 1985. Additionally, the model work and set designs are rather impressive, as is the film’s score. Raise the Titanic is a little contrived at times, but it’s also a fun piece of pulp fiction.
Review by Ragnar DanneskjöldBlockedParent2020-07-27T13:39:00Z
Translated from Clive Cussler's book of the same name, this version loses everything that work put together. The good half of the book is left on the cutting room floor and the rest is nothing more than a overpriced mess of cinematic garbage. The drama and the thrill of the hurricane sequence, where the Russians commandeer the Titanic and Pitt, with the help of the Navy seals, retakes the ship is completely cut. All of the real drama of "Silver and Gold" never even enters the conversation, Dana and Seagram's relationship has been reduced from rocky marriage to boyfriend status, Gene's journey of madness down the rabbit hole as he mirror's Brewster's quest for the Byzanium and even the nationality of the assassins who chased the miners across the United Kingdom is wrong, mutated or just left out of the discussion completely. Pitt's long-time cohorts of Rudi Gunn and Al Giodino are nowhere to be found, their generic replacements offer nothing for the script and somehow the movie finds a way to not have Dana on the ship, in fact she hardly plays any role in the movie whatsoever, and so we never get to see her much lauded striptease in the grand ballroom of the Titanic. They even found a way to misconstrue known facts at that time by not including the breaking away of the ships boilers and had the wrong smokestack snapping off from the ship before she left the surface of the Atlantic. Nothing about this movie works, even the more-than-capable cast offers no salvation to keep it afloat. For a book-to-movie translation this film gets a 2 out of 10. For general purposes, I'll be generous and give it a 4.