A guide to Titanic 3D for your (inner) teenager

It’s baaack! That giant boat of a movie is being re-released tomorrow in full 3D glory. Am I excited? Not really. I wasn’t hugely impressed with Titanic the first time around for several not-objective reasons, the most important being this: I was not a teenager.

“Here’s the thing about Titanic, and the reason 15-year-old girls love it so much: James Cameron is a 15-year-old girl,” observes Jezebel writer Lindy West, “All of the characters are either 15-year-old girls in disguise (‘Parents just don’t understand!’ ‘Waaah, make the boat go faster!’ ‘I know we literally met 20 minutes ago, but I love you with a suicidal fervor!’), or the kind of goofy caricatures that 15-year-old girls would write if we let 15-year-old girls write our blockbuster screenplays.”

Amen! And hence this guide to the Titanic 3D for its true target audience: the new generation of FB-addicted, text-happy teenagers – and their overgrown peers. So listen up, kids! Sure, there are the new, very cool 3D special effects this time around that have all the critics gushing. And no doubt, you will be  spending the next two weeks yelling, “I’m the king of the world!” But here’s what you really need to know about this 15-year old flick!

One, it’s really a Hindi movie.

Back in 1997, the New York Daily News declared , “Titanic is unabashedly American: It’s big, brash and sometimes gauche, yet also unapologetically earnest, amazing to look at and devoted to its own cause.” I beg to disagree. For most Indians, the movie is more unabashedly old school Bollywood — except with better production values.

All the big themes are vintage Hindi film: Rich girl meets poor boy; mad love at first sight; evil rich vs the noble poor; arranged rishta with nasty wealthy fiancee in a tuxedo; no less (Prem Chopra, where are you?); and, of course, the overwrought, high-pitched superhit love song, in this case, delivered by Celine Dion. All that’s missing are the dishum-dishum scenes in the end. And it’s 3-plus hours long!

Conclusion: Titanic is best enjoyed as a retro Bollywood grand romance, the kind we no longer see in the era of the uber-hip Imran Khan rom-coms.

Two, Leo is no Robert.

Titanic is famous for launching ‘Leo mania’, i.e. mobs of screaming girls who just couldn’t get enough of his gangly, little boy looks. And yes, he does look a little different now, as Kate Winslet wickedly observed , “Leo’s 37, I’m 36 — we were 21 and 22 when we made that film. You know, he’s fatter now. I’m thinner.”

But even a young Leo is unlikely to make Twilight devotees swoon any time soon. Robert Pattinson is just better looking, albeit far less talented. Many other things about the Titanic may still hold up, but not, I’m afraid, Leo’s crush-ability factor. In any case: even if your young heart does go aflutter, just don’t Google him.

Three, big is beautiful.

French director Jacques Rivette attributed much of Titanic’s popularity to its heroine, though in less than flattering terms. Winselt, he claimed , was a symbol for “inhibited, slightly plump American girls who see the film over and over as if they were on a pilgrimage” – and who “recognise themselves in her, and dream of falling into the arms of the gorgeous Leonardo.”

Those cranky French can make a crime of even the greatest virtue, and Winslet’s curvaceous body is undoubtedly one of Titanic’s best assets. In India, the 3D release comes on the heels of Vidya Balan’s stellar success in redefining the desirable female form in Bollywood. Winslet’s luminous, near-naked beauty, displayed in full 3D, will be one more strike against the size zero mafia.

And here are some special tips just for the adolescent boys. One, if you really want to see a non-PG rated version of a naked Winslet – i.e. more than her breasts – check out these eight other movies for a taste of full-frontal Kate. And just to be safe, don’t go see the film with your father. It is high on the list of movies most likely to make grown men dissolve into “an uncontrollable flood of tears.”

Dads weeping into their popcorn? Now that’s a real disaster movie.