Guiding them are expedition members in deep-diving exploration subs, including Bill Paxton, who starred in Cameron's "Titanic" and now narrates this documentary and shoots some of it himself. The result is often spellbinding, and to mention some of the sights we see is to praise the film's ambition.
The agile little camera-bots are able, for example, to snake their way into the ship's grand ballroom, and to discover that the Tiffany cut glass windows are, astonishingly, still intact. Later, Cameron is able to position one of the mini-subs outside the ship, to shine its light through the windows for the camera inside, and we see the colors brought alive by light for the first time since the ship hit the fatal iceberg.
Other scenes actually discover the brass bed in the suite occupied by the "unsinkable" Molly Brown, who was such a famous survivor she had a Broadway musical named after her, and who always insisted her bed was brass, not wood. We also see a bowler hat, still waiting atop a dresser, and glasses and a carafe, left where they were put down after a final drink.
Cameron, who achieved so much with digital effects in "Titanic," here uses similar technology to animate his haunted undersea scenes. He shoots the Titanic today--its empty corridors, its deserted grand staircase, its abandoned decks--and then populates the ship with a ghostly overlay showing the restored ship with its elegant passengers on their cruise to doom.
The movie is an impressive achievement, but that is not because of its trumpeted selling-point, the fact that it was shot in 3-D. I saw the first 3-D movie ("Bwana Devil") and I have seen most of them since, as the technology has been improved and perfected, and I have arrived at the conclusion that 3-D will never be ready for prime time: It is an unnecessary and distracting redundancy. It can be done very well (as with the custom-made $200 glasses supplied with some IMAX features) and we can admire its quality and yet doubt its usefulness.
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