James Cameron is ready to put to “rest” the decades-long Titanic debate.
Since the debut of the director’s 1997 cult classic romance-drama, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as star-crossed lovers aboard the Titanic, fans have stubbornly argued that Jack’s (DiCaprio) death was preventable.
Near the end of the film, after the Titanic capsizes, Winslet’s Rose is left floating on a door while her lover Jack is seen hanging onto it in the water next to her, before eventually freezing to death.
In addition to Winslet and DiCaprio, who have previously addressed the controversial plot point, Cameron justified the movie’s ending in a 2017 interview, saying: “Had [Jack] lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless.”
Now, “once and for all”, Cameron will shut down all the naysayers, with “scientific” proof.
Speaking with the Toronto Sun, while promoting his highly anticipated movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron revealed: “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert reproducing the raft from the movie.”
The process of which (along with the results) will be released in a National Geographic February special, in tandem with the traditional Valentine’s Day cinematic re-release of Titanic.
“We took two stunt people that were the exact body mass of Kate and Leo,” Cameron explained of the process, “and we put sensors all over them and inside them, and we put them in ice water, and we tested to see whether they could have survived by this method or that method.”
“And the answer was that there was no way they could both survive, only one could survive,” he shared.
“So we actually did a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all.”
