Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Gloria Stuart, Bill Paxton, Bernard Hill, David Warner, Victor Garber

Ah, finally we can see those deleted scenes of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the heroic off-duty copper who helps save a thousand or passengers before using his muscle to flip the barge back to its safe side. Or not.

But still, doesn’t anyone else find it strange that “Titanic” didn’t feature any of Jim Cameron’s ‘usual suspects’? (besides Bill Paxton). Where was Michael Biehn? (according to IMDB, he was the original choice for the Billy Zane scumbag role); where was Jenette Goldstein? (surely she could’ve played one of the ‘women’ who get a seat on the rafts at the end); where was the underwater sea-creature that rises above the water, swallows the fat chick on the floating piece of wood, and then returns to the bottom of the sea?

I guess this was never intended to be your ‘typical’ - and by ‘typical’ I mean, guns-blazing no-holds-barred science fiction – Jim Cameron film though was it. Or maybe it was, and Paramount balked at the idea of having Schwarzenegger play the ship’s captain.

Finally, after years and years of whining from my wife asking ‘Why Titanic hasn’t got any extras on the DVD?’ we’ve now got both the super-duper 4-disc edition of the waterlogged blockbuster, and this newly released ‘10th Anniversary Collectors Edition’ – which is merely a trimmed-down version of the former.

But first, to the movie.

It’s worth more than my mortgage, student loan and tax bill times twenty – and that’s saying something, believe me! – and deservedly so. “Titanic” wouldn’t and couldn’t have been any good had it had been made with less money (you’ve all seen the shitty television versions!) nor without James Cameron in the director’s chair : He knows how to get bang for your buck. From the get-go, we were suckered into its grandiose tale – and syrupy love story – and then, when it was time for the extras to fall smack-bang into propellers we would hurt along with them. In short, money really does talk – and Cameron made good use of those Benjamin’s; you can see every penny up on the screem. “Titanic” is one amazing looking movie.

The recent 3-Disc DVD wasn’t great - iif only because the extras component largely consisted of vintage featurettes and documentaries that looked like they'd been taken from VHS tapes that were dragged through the mud before transfer. In fact, from memory, the only real 'extras' of any worth were the audio commentaries.

The three tracks appear here again. Cameron provides one (largely technical – but never not gripping), Cast and Crew (including Gloria Stuart, Executive producer Rae Sanchini and Producer John Landau, and Kate Winslet) provide another (one of those one’s where everyone’s been recorded at different stages and they’ve all been intercut with one another – making it a little hard to work out who’s talking sometimes), and Don Lynch, Titanic's Historian and Ken Marschall, the film's Visual Historian, provide the third commentary.

Instead of the lousy extras we had to endure on the 3-Discér, we've got a whole new bunch of lousy extras! There's a ‘Behind the Scenes Mode’ which allows you to stop the film and watch short videos detailing what went into the film; the alternate ending (there’s a longer sequence with Rose at the back of the salvage ship) and Celine Dion’s music video.

If you own the 3-Disc version you most certainly don’t need this one.

Rating :
Reviewer : Clint Morris