Titanic (1997) arrived as disaster films were experiencing a comeback. Compared to the apocalypses visited on the world in Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1997) or Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), sinking a single ship may seem like small fry.
But James Cameron’s film played on the same worries about humanity’s fragility in the face of overwhelming forces (and the hubris of our technological prowess) that many films of the 1990s were exploring.
