The Like/Hate Thread

[Belle Hibiki]

Leonardo Dicaprio is one of the best actors of our time. And anyone that doesn't agree should imagine how passionate an actor would be towards his work if he starred in Titanic at such a young age.

I'm unsure what you mean by that. Are you saying that by virtue of starring in Titanic he was made into a passionate actor? That he wasn't one before Titanic? He would probably find that insulting.

Why? Because it was a James Cameron movie. And JC hadn't done anything in a while, so there was a lot of hype (just like in the lead-up to Avatar). Anyone with half a brain-stem would've recognized that getting onto Titanic is a meal-ticket.

If you are, instead, saying that the fact that he made it through the screening to get onto the movie shows how passionate he is, I don't think that's necessarily true, either. True, he's a competent actor, but it was a confluence of factors - his age, his chops, and, let's face it, his looks. He didn't make it onto Titanic PURELY because of his acting, and that shows in the movie - in ways good and bad.

In this movie, you care about him and his plight, you want him to see his children, you want him to eventually wake up and not succumb to the deepest depths of grief and depression. If you don't then you have no business watching movies.

I didn't care about his character at all, really. I felt like Nolan didn't go far enough in trying to get me to connect. This is a problem with all the characters - they're simply not developed before we're thrown into the action. Cobb and the girl (I can't even remember her name) got the longest screentime, but I wasn't invested in Cobb's success or failure at all. I was only interested in seeing what would happen, whether his buried self-destruction would win out or not, but I wasn't 'on his side.' As a director, you should want your audience to root for the protagonist, not be apathetic to his fate.

YMMV.