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16%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #4,268
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On the 100th anniversary of the original voyage, a modern luxury liner christened "Titanic 2," follows the path of its namesake. But when a tsunami hurls an ice berg into the new ship's path, the passengers and crew must fight to avoid a similar fate.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: July 5, 2011
If there was one movie in the history of cinema that did not need a remake, it would be Titanic. I mean, you can't continue the storyline that the movie presented us with: the ship sank, the hero died, and the heroine is now eighty years old. Where could you go with a sequel? Alternatively, if you wanted to ignore the storyline and just remake the sinking of the ship, well... Titanic was one of the most successful movies of all time with some of the best visuals ever seen in a disaster movie. Good luck trumping it. So, when I heard that Titanic II was in the works, I wondered what in the hell they could possibly do with it. Then, I heard that The Asylum, the reigning king of the mockbusters, was responsible for it and I got a smile on my face: yes, this could possibly be entertaining in a horrible sort of way. I popped it in today, and was shocked at how good it actually was.
On the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the Titanic II is set to take its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. The man in charge, Mr. Hayden Walsh (Shane Van Dyke), has taken all precautions imaginable: there are now more than enough lifeboats, there is advanced iceberg-detection technology on board, and safety was the number one priority when creating this massive ship. His ex-girlfriend Amy (Marie Westbrook) is on board, and though it seems to be a little awkward between them, he thinks that he can possibly rekindle their relationship while also making history. Life is good for our hero.
Of course, that changes when a Greenland glacier collapses into the ocean, setting off an 800 mph tsunami. U.S. Coast Guard captain James Maine (Bruce Davison) and scientist Kim Patterson (Brooke Burns) fly around in a helicopter issuing warnings left and right, with the emphasis being on getting the Titanic II out of the water. You see, James is also the father of Amy, and he has bad feelings about this voyage... especially when he learns that the tsunami will be sending huge glaciers straight into its path. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that a glacier eventually hits the ship and causes it to start sinking, but it's all good: there's enough lifeboats, remember, and the Coast Guard knows exactly where the ship is at. This is where the problems begin, as that initial tsunami was just the beginning... there's another one right behind it, one that will make the original look like a mere ripple in a pond. Lifeboats aren't going to do anything for the poor survivors when that hits, so it's up to Hayden to keep his ex alive on the ship while James makes his way to the site to rescue his daughter.
This is an Asylum movie, and if you don't understand what that means, let me break it down for you. The Asylum makes mockbusters, movies with misleading titles that show up on DVD and / or on SyFy while the Hollywood version is making the theater rounds. Thor is bringing in some money at the box office? Alright, they just put together a cheap knock-off entitled Almighty Thor to ride the original's coattails. This is almost exclusively the kind of movies that they make, and their movies are always cheap, low-budget affairs with horrible CGI work, bad acting, and silly storylines. They are also, in my humble opinion, usually pretty entertaining.
Titanic II is actually a big step up from their usual schlock. It in no way rivals James Cameron's film, and if you go in expecting the same level of quality from the effects and the same award-winning acting, then yes, you are going to walk away sorely disappointed. However, the CGI is noticeably better than what we have seen from their previous films. Watching the glacier collapse is downright bad, I'll be honest about that, but everything else is pretty damned good, even in high-definition. There is one scene where two helicopters attempt to maneuver their way out of the path of a massive tsunami that looks like something you would see in a Hollywood flick, while the ship is a hit or miss affair: some of the scenes look great, some look not so great. With the exception of the glacier sequence, however, it all looks a lot better than the laughable CGI we have seen in their previous films.
The storyline is also shocking in that it actually brought something new to the table. This is not a simple rehash of Cameron's movie, but there are plenty of nods and winks to the source material to be found. It pays attention to the mistakes that the character's made in the original flick (the "original passengers" of the Titanic), so that the characters found here think that they have taken their errors into account. Things happen and they wind up in the same damned boat that the original people did, and it was pretty slick how the writers worked those little nods in.
Titanic II is not as good as Cameron's Titanic, not by a long shot. It is, however, an entertaining disaster flick. There are plenty of good visuals (I never thought I'd say that in an Asylum review), the storyline is interesting, the acting is decent enough (Bruce Davison is actually really good), and the entire film kept me entertained. Titanic did not need a sequel, but the sequel that we got was not the laughable mess that I expected it to be. Yes, there are instances of bad CGI work, yes, there are some dumb decisions made by the characters, and yes, there are even some continuity and scientific errors. However, at the end of the day, it's an entertaining flick. 7/10.
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