Shalom, Gang!

If someone had told me they’d be making a sequel to “Titanic”, I’d have told them to have their meds reassessed. Yet, back in August, not only did the rumors swirl like confetti in a cyclone, but there was actually a trailer released on “YouTube” showing the various scenes of the sequel. The storyline is, upon returning to the wreck to once again retrieve the ‘Coeur de la Mare’ (how Bill Paxton knew the old lady had thrown it overboard in the first place remains a mystery,) they find on the foredeck a perfectly rectangular block of ice with the cryogenically preserved body of…you guessed it, Jack Dawson. They haul him up and defrost him, and then the remainder of the trailer deals with him trying to accept that he’s in the year 2010 and Rose is dead. Meanwhile, the military is after him, the CIA is after him, and the FBI is after him! Again, how he became a threat to national security is never explained. For those of you who have the stomach to watch this, here is the link.

Now, for the good news. This whole high-cost trailer, a tribute to the power of CGI and the human imagination, was the most colossal hoax in motion picture history! It’s hard to imagine some twenty year old geek is out there with a fifty-thousand dollar computer and operating system capable of this! Some Hollywood insiders insist it was created to pique public interest in the real “Titanic 2” film, starring Bruce Davison. This is not a sequel to the monster hit by James Cameron though. This film deals with the almost real-life ship built several years ago, originally named “Titanic 2” But after careful consideration, the ship’s builders decided that flying in the face of God twice was too risky, and supposedly it was re-named the “Queen Mary 2”. In this story, the revamped liner travels the same course as the first Titanic, but a tsunami threatens to sink this one too.

This film was a straight-to-video release, and I’m sorry I wasted my time with it. This time around, instead of the ship hitting an iceberg, the tsunami, (caused by global warming, so what else is new?) carries an iceberg into the Atlantic and the berg hits the ship! Then a second wave capsizes the sinking vessel, (can you say 'Poseidon,' kiddies?) and the poor schlemiels who made it to the lifeboats drown anyway. Bruce Davison was as good as he always is, but even he wasn’t good enough to save this film from sinking faster than the ship. No matter how you slice it, it’s still a bastard offspring clinging to “Titanic’s” coattails, and the fact that they couldn’t find a distributor to bring it to the big screen is testimony to the reality that people want to leave Titanic and its lost passengers to rest in peace. If it comes on one of the movie channels and there’s nothing better on, you might watch it then. Otherwise it’s not worth the postage to get it from Netflix®.

Till next month, gang!