TITANIC II (2011) Starring Bruce Davison, Shane Van Dyke
Recently James Cameron released Titanic 3-D in theaters to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the Titanic disaster. By now I’m sure you all know the story and you all have the Celine Dion track looping through your brain involuntarily. I wish I could say the movie I’m about to review would cleanse your pallet, but it will not. My tribute to the 100 year anniversary of Titanic will be to review the one thing people thought would never happen, a SEQUEL to Titanic! Well…kind of. The film is called TITANIC II and yes it is a real movie. The film is not directly a sequel to the famous James Cameron film, but The Asylum hoped to create some confusion with the title, and thus Titanic II was born. How do you make a sequel to a movie about a ship that is now at the bottom of the ocean? Well, you just redo the story all over again, duh! Hollywood has been using this formula for decades. It’s very easy to take a pre-existing idea, use the same name, and just change the setting and cast, and call it a re-imagining or sequel. This was the case with the TITANIC II.
The film takes place in modern times and follows the creation of a new mega cruise liner called…you guessed it, THE TITANIC II! Now let’s just stop there for a second. Who in their right mind would purchase a ticket to a cruise named after the most horrific boating accident in history? Even if the technology got better, that’s like purchasing moon flights on a space shuttle called The Challenger. It’s just a terrible idea in the first place.
The opening of the film follows a surfer who is catching waves off of the broken ice caps. That’s right; a guy is surfing off the melting polar ice caps. Do people actually do this?! The surfer is quickly disposed of after he realizes that the ice caps are breaking off in bigger chunks and causing massive tidal waves. This serves as foreshadowing for the problems the Titanic II will face later. Basically they updated the storyline and instead of random ice caps in the middle of the ocean causing the problem, it is now global warming and the polar ice caps. Al Gore would love this movie! The cast of characters then boards the Titanic II and the adventure begins. There aren’t really any notable actors in the film other than Bruce Davison whom you might remember as Senator Kelly in the X-men films. Davison plays some type of Captain/Researcher who is the father of the main character and ultimately discovers this polar ice cap problem before anyone else. Other than Davison the film revolves around a doctor on board the Titanic, and the owner of the ship who is apparently some type of celebrity (though they don’t ever fully explain who the hell he is). These characters are cookie cutter and remind me of characters from the Poseidon films. After the Titanic II sets sail the problems begin almost immediately. It’s quite hysterical how quickly the ship has problems after assuring all the crew members that “issues with icebergs are a thing of the past” and the ship is design to “avoid all ice patches”. Then almost immediately they are faced with ice related issues. You really have to turn your brain off and bury it in the ground at this point.
The film then turns into your basic “oh god we are all going to die” disaster movie. The tidal waves from the melting polar ice caps apparently dwarf any wave ever created. You know it wouldn’t be an Asylum movie without gigantic MEGA DISASTERS! At one point the tidal wave actually takes out an airplane! That’s right…an airplane could not out run a wave in the ocean, but don’t worry Bruce Davison outruns the wave with his trusty helicopter! So yeah at this point in the film I’m just waiting for the ship to sink and the credits to roll. Unfortunately the running time still has about 40 minutes left at this point and we are treated to “danger” scenes recreated from Poseidon and The Titanic. The ending of the film even resembles the ending to the original Titanic, almost exactly. There isn’t much else to say about the film at this point, it pretty much works out the way that the viewers would predict. The only other note I made about the film is that the longshots of the ship looked like CGI out of a Sega Saturn game, so that might provide you with a few laughs. Otherwise I would say do what the Titanic didn’t do, and steer clear of this iceberg. If you have to watch an Asylum film I would recommend checking out Two headed Shark Attack or Sharktopus, not this one. The only way I would watch this film again is if James Cameron himself sat down with me, simply because his face would be priceless. And spoiler alert, they still don’t find the heart of the ocean.
The Actual Trailer: TITANIC II Trailer
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