Raise the Titanic

With the Titan submersible accident being in the news, I found myself thinking of movies that might be relevant. If I wanted to be dark bordering on offensive, I'd probably suggest "The Morning After" from The Poseidon Adventure as the theme song. There's also The Neptune Factor, which I blogged about five years ago. But then I noticed that Raise the Titanic is on some of the streaming services, so I decided to watch that and do a review on it here.

The movie has a bit of a prologue with a man someplace in the Arctic who, in a cave, finds a dead body that's been saved because it's been frozen for 65 years and undisturbed. That body was of a US Army officer, surprisingly enough. And then as the man coms out of the cave, is pursued by another man who shoots him before a third man rescues him.

Cut to Washington DC, where we learn about exactly why everybody was on that island. Apparently, there are places in that part of the Arctic that are disputed territory, with the strongest current (at least in the view of the movie, which was released in 1980) claim being that of the Soviets. The Americans are trying to build a defense system that would make them invulnerable to nuclear missiles, but need a big power source for that. The only source that could do it would need some mineral called "Byzanium" (totally made up for the purposes of the movie), and the man who was shot was trying to determine whether there was any Byzanium on the island.

Now, where that dead American comes in is interesting. Apparently, he was part of an expedition all those years ago that was looking for Byzanium, a mineral little known even to scientists in the movie's world. More importantly, they apparently found it, although it's no longer on the island. Some research determines that they got it off the island and down to Britain, where they were pursued by the Russians, the Soviet Union not yet being a thing back in 1912. And as you can guess from the title of the movie, they got all the way to Southampton, where they put the mineral in shipping crates bound for America. They put those crates on a ship called... the RMS Titanic.

Jason Robards plays Admiral James Sandecker, who is part of the Navy's plan to build that defense system, together with defense contractors like Gene Seagram (David Selby). When they learn what happened to the Byzanium, they realize that the option is not to look for a new source of Byzanium, but to get the one that they already more or less know the location to... on the bottom of the Atlantic where the Titanic sank all those 70 years ago. Unfortunately, because of the depth at which the Titanic rests, they can't send divers to get the Byzanium. They also don't have submersibles that can use a mechanical arm or whatnot to retrieve it from the ship. So their ridiculous plan is... to raise the ship all the way off the seabed and then tow it to the US where they'll salvage the Byzanium.

Even though they're the Navy, they're going to need somebody who knows about complex salvage operations, and that someone is Dirk Pitt (Richard Jordan). He eventually agrees to the mission, and everybody heads to roughly where the Titanic was last known to be (apparently, the two ships that rescued the survivors and the Titanic itself in its distress calls all reported slightly different positions that are a few dozen miles apart, making finding the ship even more complex). Meanwhile, it's pretty damn obvious what the Americans are looking for when they send a flotilla out to that particular location, and the Soviets, being no dummies send a ship to monitor the situation. They don't want the Americans to get that Byzanium....

Raise The Titanic presents a scenario that's interesting, but wildly implausible. At the time the movie was made, it was still a half dozen years before researchers found the exact location of the Titanic on the seabed, at which point it was conclusively determined that the ship did not go down quietly, but broke up into a pretty large debris field, making raising the ship an impossibility. But author Clive Cussler, who wrote the book, and the filmmakers, had no way of knowing this. But even if the ship hadn't broken up in the sinking, raising it two and a half miles is highly unlikely.

The bigger problem the movie has, however, is that the script is unbelievably slow. The start of the movie presents a reasonably good espionage thriller idea, but then the movie gets bogged down in the technical details of trying to salvage a ship. And it goes on, and on. Eventually they do get back to the Cold War thriller aspect, but the way that's handled is perfunctory at best.

So it's easy to see while watching it why Raise the Titanic was panned by critics and a box-office bomb in its day. However, there still are things to recommend it. The visuals are surprisingly good for a movie from 1980, and if you're interested in the idea of the deep ocean and salvage, there's that. But Raise the Titanic really gives off the vibe of being a movie that could have been so much better than what we actually have on screen.