"Being a life-long student of the Titanic and other ships, I think a "replica" Titanic is, in a word, vulgar. This ship's loss killed over a thousand people and now some rich guy wants to build another? If he wants a historic liner buy the SS United States as others have suggested and stop trying to dump more vulgarity on a bitter disaster coated in too much already."

Sanity is so rare and refreshing. Thanks RF261.

Beyond that, the fascination with the movie is bizarre. Some people are confronted with the youthful indiscretions that no grandmother should be associated with and when the old babe dies, she meets the rebellious notch on her bedpost rather than the man she built a life and family with. I guess grandpa wasn't important.

I wonder if we pointed out that all the rich were "one-percenters" would that stop the nonsense.

The whole thing makes "Unstoppable" look like an approved safety training film.

I totally don't get the appeal of the Titanic other than a very sad historical moment. We wouldn't dream of building a replica of a train where most died in some horrific wreck... The movie was to me, a marvel in it's creation of the ship to look almost like it was really there. I have the DVD and have mostly watched the scenes of the ship leaving port and underway. Those are the parts I like the most, seeing the ship as it probably looked when all was still good. In all fairness, it's not much different than many war widows I've met while doing WW2 displays at living history events or set up around airshows. I've been told plenty of sad stories of the 'love of my life' who went off to fight WW2 and never came back. They all made lives later on but their hearts were often still with those young men who were killed in the war. I've even talked with the 'granpa' types they married later, and a few have admitted to me that they knew they ran a close (and sometimes, not even a close) second.I didn't get that either until I asked some friends who live and breathe the movie. According to them, the appeal of the film as it's been explained to me was the fact that a kid with absolutely nothing was proven to be the better man than his perceived 'betters' in that 1%. That said, all agreed that the perception of the movie might be totally different had it been released new today, v/s in the 90s...

You're welcome, superheater. All this "ship of dreams" talk about the Titanic is bull, pure and simple. "Ship of nightmares" would be more apt.

BTW: the 1997 movie is %100 bull pure and simple; no semantics can get past that. It can be credited with the rise of this "replica" nonsense, however. It's the ol' 'Quick, cash in!' mentality run amok. Meanwhile the United States rusts at anchor forlorn and forgotten ...

Say, Lee, seriously, those stories about war widows, second loves, would make a grand collection. I have not heard of a similar book/collection before.

As a transportation history buff, I was fascinated with the re-creation of the Titanic and subsequent disaster as shown in the 1997 movie. My understanding is that James Cameron went to great pains to re-create the actual historic details as accurately as possible within the constraints of dramatic filmmaking. Ron Howard's 'Apollo 13' appealed to me for similar reasons. I thought Titanic's surrounding story and fabricated romance was maudlin, implausible, and a little distasteful. I wish there was a cut of the movie that left all of it out, just for the history buffs.

I remember at the time of the movie finding a website that listed at least a half-dozen operating Titanic replicas that were in the planning stages. In 15 years, we've seen exactly zero of them come to fruition. I'll believe this latest one when I see it.

James Cameron should be applauded for getting the look and feel of Titanic right, but the best scenes for me were the frantic race in the engineroom trying to get her reversed and turned to avoid hte iceberg.

We've got two perfectly good ocean liners right here in the United States...the aforementioned SS United States and the RMS Queen Mary. They could go to sea and be one hundred times the ships Titanic ever was....and they are both steamships.....

A much better movie overall on this subject is the British classic, "A Night To Remember," from 1958, based on a non-fiction book of the same title.

(Note--for some reason the Wikipedia link below does not work properly, but an inquiry from there to the move does work.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_to ... (1958_film)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBMz6szufVk

One thing Cameron got better were the engine room scenes. I wish they could be spliced into the 1958 movie, and then you would have about as close to perfect a film on the subject as possible.

A bit about the engine room scenes of Titanic: they were actually shot on board the SS Jeremia O'Brien, a WW II era Liberty ship. A trick Cameron used to make the O'brien's engines look like the much larger ones on the Titanic was to use shorter actors in the scene; I have also read that the ladders and walkways around the engines were temporarily replaced with reduced scale versions to go with the shorter actors, again increasing the apparent size of the engines.

Some of the crew members of the Jeremia O'Brien later joked about a detail in their engine room scenes. Seems the O'Brien had at the time a bad rod bearing that made a pounding noise that's in the sound track. As the Titanic was a new ship, that's something that you normally wouldn't expect to hear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Jeremiah_O'Brien

http://www.ssjeremiahobrien.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_0CkWOxtpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkYQPJqnVnA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdyjX8_fCUo

I wish I could go back and better record all tghe stories I heard from the 80s on. You can't imagine some of the things I'd heard from vets and their wives over all that time. I didn't recird a one or take down any names. Oh how I wish I'd done a better job of recording those stories now.

Mr. Cameron's much-vaunted replica of the Titanic is scarcely flawless. Dr. Paul Lee, a Titanic expert, reveals why at this page on his site: http://www.paullee.com/titanic/jc1997goofs.html

Sterring us back towards trains: anybody know the class of steam engine pulling the boat train Kenneth More is on at the start of A Night To Remember?

Off Topic, but.....New Titanic?
Sep 04, 2002
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3861&p=17268&hilit=titanic+replica#p17268

Marine Preservation - Big Doings in Australia
Sep 02, 2012
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33807&p=182226&hilit=titanic+replica#p182226

Alright, it's a replica. But if it ain't the same, it's a LOUSY replica. Maybe the term "simulacrum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum would be more appropriate.

More like profile "steamship". However that may not be all that bad--but the idea of selling ocean passages without modern information technology may well be an epic fail. It certainly can add to the charm, especially for those who want to be off the grid for a while, but by and large most folks absolutely demand being "connected".

Not much more until they actually launch it.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT