Double Review: A Titanic Disaster

So let’s talk about what makes a good children’s film. The problem with kids is that, and hear me out with this, they’re idiots. I mean, come on – if I stumbled around in their uncoordinated way, saying exactly what was on my mind with poor pronunciation, being amused by the most trivial things, you’d think I was just very drunk. Would people say, “Aww, isn’t he cute?” No, they wouldn’t. They would more likely say, “You’re under arrest, sir. Please stop vomiting and put down the traffic cone.” However, there is a difference between kids’ films which respect children’s (little) intelligence and those which act as if their audience are bone-headed morons raised on a diet of microwave radiation and lead paint. The two films I was subjected to were the latter, with a heavy dose of hallucinogenic drugs to boot.

The first, Legend Of The Titanic, starts with an almost shot-for-shot copy of James Cameron’s Titanic, with a posh girl stepping out of a carriage and looking up at a big boat. Her Dad then points at some nasty bloke and says “You’re marrying him, you are,” to which she replies “No, I’m not, Dad, you arse”. Or something like that, I can’t remember. It only starts to differ from JC’s Titanic when we look at the male romantic interest. Instead of being a rugged, scoundrel, Leonardo Dicaprio-type of guy, he’s a rich prince with massive sideburns and a questionably close relationship with his dog. “Fetch!” he says to his dog, looking at the lovely lady, “Take my dreams to her!” The dog runs through the crowd in a couple of flaccid slapstick sequences that five-year-olds are meant to find hilarious, finally making it over to Kate-Winslet-except-due-to-copyright-she-isn’t. He grabs her glove and runs back over to Sideburns. Sideburns takes the glove from him and – I’m not making it up – sniffs it. The sniffing is accompanied by a satisfied grunt. Erm… I’m sorry, animated children’s film, I didn’t realise this was a thing we did these days.

Anyway, aside from sexual practices that deviants in the modern age can pay for on the internet, there’s also some talking mice all named after types of cheese (Who wrote the gags here, Miranda Hart?) boarding the boat. Then, after everyone’s got on the boat and Titanic’s been ripped-off a bit more, Kate-Winslet-but-not runs up to the front of the boat and cries a bit over the side. Then some dolphins pop up, and this is where things get trippy. It turns out that Kate can talk to the dolphins. And why? Well, prepare yourself for this, the most delightfully bullshit line from a children’s film ever:

“You can understand us thanks to a net of magic moonbeams which caught your tears before they fell into the water!”

I paused the film, went to the kitchen to grab the crate of beer that I knew I’d need to make it through this film, and returned to replay this exquisite line a few times. This is where I started drinking heavily. The film generally continued in this nonsensical way, with some strange plot of evil sharks with New York accents tricking a talking baby-face giant octopus into throwing an iceberg in the way of the Titanic in some convoluted plot to give an evil man with an eye patch contracts to kill all the whales. The conclusion of the film seemed to be that the Titanic sunk because of evil men with physical disabilities, and it doesn’t matter because no-one died anyway. I guess that’s what you have to do in a kids’ film about a human tragedy. I’m sure the animated retelling of The Troubles in Ireland would involve lots of smiley leprechauns eating potatoes but it does seem to be another example of Hollywood’s tricky relationship with historical accuracy.

The second, Titanic: The Legend Goes On, I decided couldn’t make much less sense than what I had already witnessed, so I was lured into a false sense of security. Plus, I was drunk by this point, so I was in the right place to watch a kids’ film. However, I knew this film would be weird when the opening credits were in Italian. The Italians are world leaders when it comes to pizza, classical music and womanizing, but filmmakers they are not (see Troll 2 for evidence of this). T:TLGO has about thirty different subplots which amble around for an hour before anyone even sees the iceberg, and no-one seems to notice they’re on a boat. The dodgy lip-sync mixed with awful voice-acting makes everyone seem like they were taught English by the Teletubbies, Kate-Winslet-but-not falls in love with a man about as macho as Louis Spence, and it’s all just too awful for words. “Why, God, why?” I cried, downing my fifth bottle as it all played out.

Oh, and a dog does a rap. I don’t know why. It just does. Not in the middle of all the death or anything, but… well, I simply have no words left.

So, what can we learn from this experience? I honestly don’t know. Maybe the lesson is that, like dogs, awful films are not just for Christmas, but for life. And like dogs, awful films are everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, and yet some people seem to love them. They also both occasionally attack small children, though at least with bad films this is confined to mauling their minds rather than their faces as well. We just have to hope they don’t start stealing your gloves for sexual purposes or doing bad rapping. Let’s just get one thing clear, though: the next time I’m given an awful film, I won’t hesitate to put it down.