In 1996 I decided this TV miniseries was a ripoff to grab viewers' attention a year before James Cameron's blockbuster opened. I haven't changed my mind. The plot is mechanical as a watch; within minutes of meeting each new character, or of their shipboard meetings with each other, we know almost exactly what will happen to each one. The writers resort to the tired ploy of having characters introduce each other to viewers--e.g., Eva Marie Saint, a society matron, "explains" others to her granddaughter: Molly Brown, vulgar but too rich to ignore, the disreputable Mr Guggenheim, the "Jewish" Strausses. The acting stinks all round. Worst, from any standpoint, is the hysterical mother who refuses to leave her cabin for the lifeboats without her husband. The whole thread involving this couple and their nanny sets your teeth on edge, though it is based on a real couple who died because they stayed on board too long to find their son, who was safe in a lifeboat w/the nanny. The thread is so badly written, so implausibly dramatized, that were it not that the mother's idiocy dooms her annoyingly precocious daughter, it's almost possible to say she deserves to drown. As usual, Ms Zeta Jones is more impressed with her own beauty than with the need to act. Marilu Henner is worse miscast as Molly Brown in this film than Cloris Leachman in "S.O.S. Titanic" (1979); the real Molly was not as brazen as the vulgarian we see here. Henner seems trapped in some proto-feminist, sexually revolutionized time warp. George C. Scott was in poor health in 1996, and seems propped up for many of his scenes as Capt. Smith; was his melodramatic characterization an effort to compensate for physical immobility? Tim Curry badly overdoes the slime as a lustful, larcenous steward. The only remotely believable figures are a young British criminal, his Danish shipboard sweetheart, and the British working-class family with whom she travels. Avoid this one. It sank before it ever left the dock. The iceberg might as well have been lurking in Southampton harbor.
