The movie starts out in the present day (well, present day in
the dark ages of the 1990s). A guy named Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) is heading
up a crew of people searching for some kind of treasure in the wreck of the
legendary Titanic. During one of the dives, he thinks
he's found it, hauling a safe up to his boat and making a big ceremony out of
opening it…
However,
when he opens the safe, there's nothing inside. Lovett and the crew are bummed
out, of course, but they do find a drawing of
a woman apparently wearing what he's looking for: a very large diamond (and
nothing else: yowza).
Lovett
ends up on the news talking about his hunt for the diamond and the discovery of
the drawing. An old woman sees him and gives him a call—because she's
the woman in that drawing.
Not
everyone in Lovett's crew is convinced the old woman is telling the truth, but
they fly her out and on to the ship—presumably in case she knows where the
diamond ended up after the sinking. Once she's all aboard, she settles in and
tells them the story of her trip on the Titanic…
While
a lot of her fellow passengers on that ship were pretty hyped up to sail on the
"unsinkable ship," she was in a major funk when she boarded. It seems
she was not looking forward to going back home and marrying her beau, Cal
(Billy Zane). She was traveling with said fiancé, his valet Lovejoy (David
Lovejoy), and her mommy dearest.
While
the audience sees young Rose getting dragged onto Titanic, a guy named Jack
is playing in a poker game—and tickets to get on the Titanicare in the pot. He
wins the game on a full house, and so he and his friend Fabrizio have to rush
to make it in time—but they get on board.
It
turns out that the Swedish dudes who lost the poker game ended up winning…their
lives.
Rose and Jack meet when Jack comes upon Rose trying to work up
the nerve to throw herself off the back of the ship. Yes, that's how
miserable she is. He succeeds in convincing her to come back over the railing,
but she slips in the process. Jack hauls her back on board, landing on top of
her—and of course, this is when other people come upon them and entirely
misunderstand the situation.
A
crowd gathers that includes the crew, Cal, and Lovejoy, and Rose is (of course)
reluctant to explain what she was actually doing. However, as the crew prepares
to detain Jack for trying to assault her, she manages to come up with a story
about how she leaned too far overboard staring at the propellers, and Jack
saved her.
As
a result of all this, Cal ends up inviting Jack to dinner with them as a thank
you. Lovejoy, however, doesn't seem convinced that Jack is the big hero
everyone is making him out to be. In fact, he seems to have taken an immediate
dislike to the boy.
And
hey, fair enough, since Jack quickly ends up stealing Rose's heart away from
Lovejoy's boss. He takes Rose dancing down below deck with the other steerage
passengers, draws her nude in her suite (resulting in the drawing that Lovett
finds many years later), and then they end up getting frisky in the cargo hold,
in the backseat of a car (proving that people have been sexing in the backseats
of cars since cars with backseats were invented).
When
Cal realizes what's happening, he's super unimpressed.
Meanwhile,
as all this love drama is going on, Titanic is having her
own woes. In an effort to make a big "splash," the ship's
powers-that-be had agreed to speed the ship up and reach New York earlier than
expected. That would have been super impressive...
However,
that extra speed makes it a lot harder to spot icebergs in time to do anything
about them, and so Titanic ends up
smacking into one. Unfortunately, that creates enough damage that the ship's
builder, Mr. Andrews (Victor Garber), realizes that Titanic is definitely
going to sink in an hour or two, despite the crew's best efforts to save her.
Evacuation
efforts kick into gear, but they're pretty disorganized and favor the richer
passengers. Lots of the steerage passengers end up locked below deck as the
water flows up through the bottom of the ship, and the crew loads lifeboats
pretty sparsely—wouldn't want to overcrowd the posh folks, after all.
As
the boat sinks further and further, and it becomes clear that most people
aren't going to make it into a boat, panic sets in. Despite her indiscretions
with Jack, Cal makes an effort to get Rose and leave with her.
Rose
and Jack don't make it onto lifeboats, and so they go down with the
ship—literally. However, they manage to avoid drowning, and they find a door
that Rose can float on (apparently, it can't withstand both of their weights).
They wait for some of the lifeboats to come back for them once the sucking
motion of Titanic's sinking dies down, but that takes a
lot longer than expected.
When
a lifeboat finally comes back to look for survivors, it appears that most
people have frozen to death in the water. Rose is still alive, but apparently a
little delirious, and she becomes extremely agitated when she realizes that
Jack has frozen to death in the water beside her. She appears almost ready to
give up, but then she remembers that she made him a promise to keep going no
matter what—"I'll never let go, Jack!"—and so she manages to get the
attention of the lifeboat that returned.
When
she makes it to New York on the boat that picked up survivors, she gives her
name as Rose Dawson as a tribute to her lost love.
Back
in the present, Rose's story seems to have made an impact everyone listening,
even Lovett, who had previously just treated the Titanic as an
opportunity to look for treasure rather than a tragic story of human loss. He
seems ready to abandon the search for the Heart of the Ocean.
Which
is ironic because—surprise—it turns out the diamond is actually on board with
them? Rose has had it all this time, since Cal stuck it in the pocket of a coat
he gave to her to keep her warm during the sinking. After telling her whole
story to Lovett and company, she sneaks out of her cabin in the middle of the
night and drops the diamond off the side of Lovett's boat.
The
movie ends with Rose apparently dying in her sleep, surrounded by photos of the
adventures she had after the Titanic trip, and
being reunited with Jack (and other dead Titanic passengers)
in the afterlife.
