Tuesday, May 1, 2012

2012 Titanic ITV miniseries Review

I know most of the content of this blog has focused on the Titanic because of the anniversary. In the near future, as soon as I get the crop in, I'll try get more general content posted. In the meantime, it rained and I had a day off so I watched the four part Titanic miniseries by Julian Fellowes during my down time.

Given the boasts that Fellowes made earlier about it being more accurate and better overall than Cameron's film raised the bar quite high. I know reviews talked about how slow this was when it first aired, but I continued to expect quality based on those claims. In short, most of the reviews were right. Overall, this is a slow paced miniseries. However, that doesn't mean that it is all bad either. Each episode picks up dramatically when the ship starts sinking. That's right, each episode starts before the collision and tells the story from a different point of view with the different characters popping up at different times in the segments from other people's perspective. While this is a novel concept, I think the overall quality could have been better if it had been told in a linear fashion.

Performance wise, Geraldine Somerville was great as the Countess of Manton. Toby Jones and Maria Doyle Kennedy were also great as a bickering second class couple. There were a few other decent performances as well, but most of the acting is either overdone or not quite up to par.

There are very few actual shots of the ship sinking. Most of them are done in the background behind main characters struggling in the foreground. The shot of the ship breaking in two behind the men climbing on the upside down collapsible is cool (even though they have the collapsible on the Starboard instead of Port side).

Overall, this was an okay miniseries. Definitely not the best, but certainly not the worst. One thing is for sure, this didn't live up to Fellowes claims.

Rating: 6/10.

As always, thanks for reading.