Twenty-five years on, “Titanic” feels like a prophecy

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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. He was king of the world.

The late 1990s were an age of hubris, and James Cameron, the director of “Titanic", earned his. Launched 25 years ago, his film was the most expensive ever made—beset, before its release, by doubts about its minor stars and the glum storyline. Effortless sinking-themed headlines awaited.

It became the first movie to earn $1bn and won 11 Oscars. At the awards ceremony, which in those days people still watched, Mr Cameron crowned himself world king in an exultant line from the screenplay. There have been many adaptations of the Titanic story, before and after this one.

A silent short came out a month after the disaster in 1912, starring a real-life survivor. A lunatic Nazi propaganda version was shot during the war on Joseph Goebbels’s orders. “A Night to Remember", a poignant effort of 1958, overlaps with “Titanic" in scenes and motifs—the heavy-handed ironies, a game of ice football on deck, a child gazing at distress flares as if they were fireworks.

In both, the band’s musicians play on, say their farewells, then play on again. Yet for all the competition and its clichés, “Titanic" rules the waves. A quarter of a century on, people are still arguing on the internet over whether, in the finale, Jack could have squeezed onto that bit of debris with Rose.

The appeal is not just the lavish sets and special effects or Leonardo DiCaprio’s cheekbones. Crucially, Mr Cameron sneaked two films into one three-hour movie, which hinges in the middle as the ship’s hull does in his telling. Without the first half, “Titanic" would never have circumnavigated the globe in the