Well, for a TV production this still is a quite good one. Of course it's not as well known and appreciated as the multiple Oscar winner from 1997, this movie fairly much tells the same story, with the same characters and situations but also with the same sort of stupid fiction writing.
It's an almost 3 hour long production, which means that you'll have to go through a lot of drama before the sinking is starting. This movie has a couple of fictitious characters and plot-lines in it that are just too distracting from the bigger picture and above all totally unnecessarily. I mean, when will film-makers learn that the true story about the Titanic itself is already good and fascinating enough to fill a movie with, with all of its persons and real life situations involved. In that regard this movie really doesn't differ much from similar attempts and therefore also adds little to what has been told so far about the Titanic.
Guess this movie got made to profit from the hype surrounding the James Cameron production with the same tittle, which had already began production first in 1995. They had to rush this movie to release it before the James Cameron movie, which is the reason why the movie is not always very slick looking but considering the budget, the circumstances and the time span this movie got made in, the end result is still quite surprising and satisfying. Both movies are comparable in lots of ways and some sequences and lines of dialog are just totally the same, which is a bit of an odd sight at times to notice.
This is not a lame looking TV production, with low production values and bad acting involved throughout. They actually did a good job with filming it and the effects are also surprisingly good looking, especially for an 1996 movie with such a restrained budget.
The movie has a quite impressing cast but yet none of the characters really work out well. It's because the actors are not really given much room to work with, also since the movie can't really seem to decide on which characters to put its main emphasis. The movie focuses a bit on everyone now, making the movie filled with plenty of characters and some uninteresting side tracks. Because of this some of the story lines within the movie also don't really work out. A bit of a shame of the talents of the fine actors, such as George C. Scott, Tim Curry, Eva Marie Saint and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
A quite good attempt but it just isn't special or impressive enough to rate this even above the over praised 1997 version.
6/10
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