Director of Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron, is setting out to prove once and for all that Jack could not have possibly survived at the end of his classic film, Titanic, putting an end to arguably the biggest controversy in modern cinema.
What’s Happening:
- According to a report in The Toronto Sun, after pleading his case for the last quarter century, Titanic director James Cameron revealed while he was doing press for his latest film, Avatar: The Way of Water, that he is out to prove once and for all that there is no way that Jack could have survived at the end of the iconic motion picture.
- How? Through a documentary that is set to debut on National Geographic in February alongside a re-release of the film on Valentine’s Day.
- Titanic debuted in 1997, and since then, what has arguably been the most debated topic in modern cinema has been on the minds of viewers everywhere. Could Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) have survived on the floating door with Rose (Kate Winslet) saving his life as well as hers?
- Storytellers and Cameron himself all agree on the dramatic purpose, with Cameron even saying “No, he needed to die. It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice.” However, the debate usually rages on into a scientific argument, and that’s where Cameron reveals that a scientific study has been performed to finally end this debate, the results of which are the topic of that aforementioned National Geographic documentary.
- While Cameron’s Nat Geo doc will likely take the far-more scientific and educated analysis, this isn’t the first time that this debate has been argued with some kind of science-based merit. A 2013 episode of Mythbusters took on the topic, with then-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman theorizing that the pair could have survived together by tying life vests under the door to help with buoyancy. In 2017, Cameron disagreed publicly with the episode, telling The Daily Beast, “OK, so let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees; your brain is starting to get hypothermia. Mythbusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later — which means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you five to 10 minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead. So that wouldn’t work. [Jack’s] best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died. They’re fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but they’re full of [expletive deleted].”
- Does anyone else involved have anything to say? How about Jack himself, Leonardo DiCaprio? In 2019, while doing press for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Leo and fellow cast members from that film, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie discussed the controversial nature of the scene, while also adding their own input. However, DiCaprio had no comment on the matter, though he clearly had things to say.
What They’re Saying:
- James Cameron: “We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all. We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February. We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive. Maybe … maybe … after 25 years, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.”
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