Saturday 27 October 2012

Titanic (2012 Miniseries)

Genre: Miniseries, Period Drama
Rating: B-

I'm still a bit undecided on this show. There are elements that I really enjoyed - particularly in the way they ended it. I don't just mean in that the boat sank and some people died while others didn't, I mean that after three rather disjointed and confusing episodes they still managed to make it suspenseful and make me care about who lived and who died.

The basic story behind this is obvious, and because of the sheer volume of characters within it I'm not going to really summarize things too much. Basically, the show is four episodes long with each of the first three episodes introducing the audience to the characters as they embark on the Titanic and leading up to the hitting of the iceberg. Each of these first episodes ends with this moment, and as such each episode introduces things differently and largely covers the same span of time. The final episode is the sinking and we find out the fates of the characters we've kind of gotten to know.

Because of the nature of the show things get a bit confusing. There are characters in the first episode who seem to disappear until the fourth, and there are events that happen multiple times in the series, with each repetition being altered to follow a different point of view. I really like what they tried to do here overall, but it gets a bit bogged down after awhile. The short length of the series doesn't mesh well with the sheer volume of the cast. The creators were trying to tell too much of a story in too little of a time.

That being said, because of the nature of the show I did still manage to get attached to the characters, and as the boat sunk I was anxious about who would survive and who wouldn't, particularly among the male and lower class characters. If you think about it, that's what a show about the Titanic is supposed to do.

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