Titanic

The film opens not in 1912 but in the present, on a research ship. A treasure hunter, Brock Lovett, is sending submersibles down to the wreck of the Titanic, hunting for a legendary blue diamond. What his team brings up instead is a drawing of a young woman wearing it. The image reaches a 100-year-old survivor, Rose Dawson Calvert, who tells them quietly that the woman in the picture is her — and begins to talk.

Southampton, April 1912. Seventeen-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater boards the largest ship ever built with her mother and her fiancé, Caledon Hockley, a steel heir. The family money is gone; the marriage is the arrangement that will save them. Rose's world is lavish and airless, and she can see the rest of her life laid out for her like a set table. On the second night she runs to the stern rail meaning to jump.

Jack Dawson, a penniless young artist travelling in steerage on a ticket he won at cards, talks her back over the rail. Their first meeting is a lie told to the crew to explain why he was holding her. It buys him a dinner in first class, and Rose an evening down in third, where the drinking and dancing are louder and more alive than anything upstairs. Cal and Rose's mother watch the friendship harden into something else, and set about crushing it.

Late on the fourth night the lookouts see the iceberg far too late. The ship turns, but she strikes along her starboard side below the waterline. On the bridge the noise seems almost trivial; below, the water is already coming in.

Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, works it out with a pencil and tells Captain Smith the truth: too many forward compartments are open to the sea, the flooding will spill over from one into the next, and the ship will founder. Then comes the second, colder piece of arithmetic. There are lifeboats for roughly half the people aboard, and in the confusion the first boats are lowered barely half full. Bruce Ismay, the man who runs the line, hovers at the officers' shoulders and eventually steps into a boat himself.

Meanwhile Cal has had a crewman plant the diamond on Jack, who is handcuffed in an office deep in the ship as the water climbs. Rose refuses a seat in a lifeboat, goes back down and frees him. The film's most furious sequence follows: gates held shut across the third-class corridors, families waiting below in their lifebelts, stewards saying it will be their turn soon. Upstairs, the band goes on playing on the boat deck; Andrews stands alone by the fireplace; the captain goes back to the bridge.

The bow goes under, the stern lifts, and the ship tears apart between her funnels. The stern falls back, rises almost vertically and slides down. What follows is the part audiences remember least clearly and the film insists on: the ship's sinking is not the disaster. The sea is about −2°C, and the hundreds of people left in the water do not drown so much as freeze, in minutes, calling out until the noise thins into silence.

Jack finds Rose a piece of floating panelling that will hold one person. He stays in the water, holding her hand, and talks to her until he can no longer answer. Only one boat comes back to search, far too late, and it lifts a handful of survivors out of a field of the dead. Rose lets Jack go and signals to it with a whistle taken from a dead officer.

She is picked up by the Carpathia the next morning. Asked her name, she gives Jack's. Cal, who survives, never finds her. Eighty-four years later, the old woman finishes the story, walks to the stern of the research ship in the dark and drops the diamond — worth more than the entire salvage operation — into the sea above the wreck.

Jack and Rose are entirely fictional, and so is the blue diamond. Almost everyone around them was real: Captain Edward John Smith; Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, who worked out after the collision that too many compartments were open and gave her roughly ninety minutes; J. Bruce Ismay, who ran the White Star Line; First Officer William Murdoch; the eight musicians under bandmaster Wallace Hartley, none of whom survived; and Margaret Brown. There is even a coincidence the producers only learned about after release: a real crewman named J. Dawson — Joseph Dawson — is buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Margaret Brown is the clearest case of a legend the film simply inherited. She was never called "Molly" in her life — she was Maggie as a girl and Margaret as a woman. The nickname and the whole "Unsinkable Molly Brown" persona were built after her death in 1932, by a Denver Post writer in 1933 and then a popular author, before a Broadway show and a 1964 film fixed it permanently. She was in Boat 6, she did help row, and the women in that boat did want to go back — but it was Quartermaster Robert Hichens at the tiller who refused, and Boat 6 never returned. Only Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, in Boat 14, went back into the wreckage, and he found very few people still alive.

The film's anger about class is not misplaced. Of the passengers, roughly 62% of first class survived, 41% of second, and about 25% of third; the crew fared worst of all at around 23%. Break it down further and it is starker still: of the women and children in first class, five were lost out of 148; in third class, 138 were lost out of 259. Overall about 74% of women and 52% of children survived, against 20% of men.

Where the film goes beyond the record is the mechanism. It shows gates deliberately locked to keep steerage below while first class fills the boats. Gates and barriers genuinely existed — American immigration rules of the period required physical separation of third class to control infectious disease — and at least one survivor described a sailor locking a gate, which was then broken open. But a third-class steward testified the gates were opened, historians find no evidence of a policy of leaving those passengers to drown, and the lawyer who represented third class at the inquiry concluded there was no proof of deliberate discrimination in the evacuation. Distance, language, a maze of corridors, late warnings and the reluctance of families to separate did a great deal of the killing. That is less satisfying than a padlock — and it is closer to the truth.

"Unsinkable" was never a slogan. White Star never formally advertised her that way; trade journals called her practically unsinkable, with the qualifier attached. The flat, confident claim really belongs to the days after the sinking, when a company vice-president told the New York Times he had believed her unsinkable. The film's own line about God being unable to sink her is invented.

Ismay pushing the captain for more speed is a staple of popular retellings and appears in the film. There is no evidence for it.

Murdoch's shooting and suicide is the one that caused real harm. Several survivors — among them George Rheims and Eugene Daly — did describe an officer shooting a man near the last collapsible and then shooting himself, and other officers admitted firing warning shots that night. But nothing establishes that the officer was Murdoch, and the film names him. His family and his home town of Dalbeattie in Scotland were distressed. On 15 April 1998, Scott Neeson of 20th Century Fox went to Dalbeattie, said publicly that Murdoch really was a hero in life, apologised for the distress caused to his relatives and the town, and handed £5,000 to Murdoch's nephew for a memorial prize at the local school. The scene stayed in the film.

Titanic shows the officers firing rockets at a light in the distance and then lets the light go. It was a real ship, and the argument about her has run for a century. The SS Californian had stopped for the night because of ice. Her single wireless operator, Cyril Evans, shut his set down at about 23:35 and went to bed — minutes before the collision. Her officers watched eight white rockets go up over a nearby vessel and took no action; her master, Captain Stanley Lord, was not roused into doing anything. Both the American and British inquiries of 1912 condemned him, the British one concluding that the Californian might have saved many if not all of those lost. A 1992 reappraisal by the British Marine Accident Investigation Branch still criticised Lord's inaction, but judged that she could not in fact have reached the scene in time — at best she would have done the job the Carpathia did.

Lord's defenders spent decades arguing that the ship the Titanic saw was a third vessel, the Norwegian sealer Samson, whose crew supposedly saw rockets while hunting illegally. Records placing the Samson in an Icelandic port around that date have effectively destroyed that defence.

The ship that did come gets almost no screen time either. The Carpathia was 58 miles away when her operator took the distress call. Captain Arthur Rostron turned her round, shut off the heating and hot water to force every ounce of steam into the engines, drove her at about 17.5 knots — several knots above her rated speed — through the same ice field, and had blankets, soup and doctors waiting. She reached the boats before dawn and lifted just over 700 people out of them. It is the one unambiguously good piece of seamanship in the whole night, and the film gives it a single shot.

Survivors said the ship broke in two. The 1912 British inquiry preferred the flat denial of Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the most senior surviving officer, and the version that went into the history books was of a ship sinking intact. On 1 September 1985, Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel found her at about 3,800 metres, in two main pieces roughly 600 metres apart. Eva Hart, who had watched it as a seven-year-old and said so for seventy-three years, lived to see it. The film shows the break, and in showing it, it takes the survivors' side.

The exact choreography is still argued over. Evidence from the wreck suggests the ship probably broke at a far shallower angle than the near-vertical stern of the film — estimates in the region of 11 to 23 degrees — and experts still disagree about what failed first. Cameron himself dived to the wreck in 1995 before writing the script, and in 2012 he replaced the star field above Rose's raft with the real sky of that night, after the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out that the one in the film was wrong.

Two more things the film leaves quieter than the record does. The famous image of Thomas Andrews alone in the smoking room by the clock rests on a single steward's account, and that steward had probably left the ship some forty minutes earlier; other witnesses describe Andrews still working. And how Captain Smith died is simply not known — the accounts contradict each other, and his body was never recovered.