Columbus Dispatch
Wednesday August 6, 1980

What Do You Do With It Once You 'Raise The Titanic'

By Desmond Ryas
Of Knight-Ridder Newspapers

     Anyone proposing to hoist the Titanic from its resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean ought to have a reason.  The one advanced in Raise The Titanic! puts the film beyond salvage.
     Movies whose producers insist on appending exclamation marks to the title as in Raise The Titanic! and Sink the Bismarck! are inherently suspect .  They sound like a loyal after-dinner toast at a veterans convention.

     RAISE THE TITANIC! -- which seems to be longer than the liner in question -- suggests that a consignment of a metal called byzanium was stashed aboard the ship on her fateful maiden voyage in 1912.
     For the purposes of the extremely trying plot of Raise the Titanic! byzanium is needed by the U.S. government for a new missile defense system.
     The cache aboard the Titanic comes from a lode in Greenland mined by the Russians before World War I.  Where they acquired the remarkable prescience to foresee the metal's role in nuclear weaponry more than 60 years later is one of the many questions Raise the Titanic! leaves trailing in its wake.  Why it would not be more sensible to find the original source of the metal is another.

     BYZANIUM TAKES the movie into a series of bizarre turns and despite the expenditure of a reported $36 million, Raise the Titanic!  has very little else going for it.  It is constantly cutting away from the salvage operation to pour more oil -- or byzanium -- on the already troubled waters of its narrative.
     The Soviets want the metal, and so we cut to the Soviet embassy, where their nationality is established by Slavic inflections, mean expressions and the presence of a string quartet at a diplomatic reception.
     Although a great deal of the film is given over to underwater shots of the salvage operation, we are given only a cursory explanation of it.  Movies that deal in fairly abstruse areas of science have two choices.  They can try to explain the technology or gloss over it.  A film like The China Syndrome can take the latter course and still work very well because of the issues it deals with.

     RAISE THE Titanic lacks that support, and the intriguing problem of how the vast ship is to be lifted is dismissed in a few sentences by Jason Robards as the admiral in charge of the project.  Besides these drawbacks, there is the recurring problem common on the films made by producer Lord Grade's organization.  They are intended for a world market where audiences are less demanding and scripts have to be amenable to dubbing in many languages.
     It also means that spectacle -- in this case the movement of underwater craft, the setting of explosives and the actual raising of the ship -- takes precedence over character.  The people in Raise the Titanic! are not so much stereotypes as afterthoughts and it is almost unfair to pass judgments on an actor trapped in one of these parts.  The terms of the film force them to react to machines, video screens, sad dials rather than act.

     UNDER JERRY Jameson's direction, the film moves along like a tramp steamer taking in water and John Barry has written a score that conforms to this pace.  Even the scenes that are supposed to be spectacular are less than imposing and there are several unfortunate shots that destroy the scale between the Titanic and the rescue ships.
     Cinematically, the Titanic made a much more interesting film going down -- in A Night to Remember -- than it does coming up.