New York Times
Friday August 1, 1980

Screen:  'Raise the Titanic,' Her Cargo Is Dangerous
By Janet Maslin

     Take the adventure out of an adventure movie and what have you got?  A lot of hearty he-men, barking commands or insults and offering terse congratulations on a job well done.  Anyone who can't figure out that the job is in "Raise The Titanic!", incidentally ought to go see a film that's less demanding.  Finding one won't be easy.

     "Raise the Titanic!," which opens at the Ziegfeld today, is dopily brusque even for an adventure film.  In fact, it speaks a language all its own.  "If we're lucky, we can make nuclear warfare obsolete," observes someone, with typical sang-froid at the beginning of the story.  It seems that the Titanic sunk carrying samples of a special radioactive mineral, one of those substances capable of either saving or wrecking the world, depending upon whose hands the substance falls into.  And so the plan of the title is dreamed up, with Dirk Pitt (Dirk Pitt?), played by Richard Jordan, in charge of the salvage operation.  "If Dirk says he can handle it, I'm willing to go to the President and do my best to push it through," promises Jason Robards as the leathery Admiral Sandecker.
     Off goes the admiral to his Presidential meeting.  As they see him returning, Pitt and Dr. Gene Seagram (David Selby) speculate on the outcome of the session as follows:  "That didn't take long."  "It never takes long to say no."  "It never takes long to say yes, either."  Maybe not, but that's longer than it takes to write this kind of screenplay.
    The Navy knows roughly where the Titanic lies:  "One way or another we're in the ballpark," an officer declares.  "The trouble is, sir, it could wind up being a damn big ballpark," offers one of his men.  No such luck.  The ship id discovered and up she goes in sequences that ought to be the movie's finest hour.  The performances in "Raise the Titanic," by a cast that also includes Alec Guinness, Anne Archer and M. Emmet Walsh, are perfunctory enough to place an unusually large burden upon the special effects and underwater activity.
     As John Barry's theme music repeats endlessly, the undersea exploration unfolds.  The watery deep has much the same ambience as cinematic outer space, as big, cumbersome hunks of machinery glide to and fro.  This is staged adequately, but without much excitement.  Later on, as the ship is propelled to the surface, things take a lively turn, mostly because the special effects are so odd.

     The glistening, quivering air bubbles that burst out of the ship should be readily familiar to anyone who's ever broken a thermometer.  They look just like globs of mercury and there's no mistaking the miniature Titanic for anything truly ship-sized. Nor will anyone imagine, in the process shots near the film's ending, that a real, rusted ocean liner has actually made its appearance in New York harbor.