I should note that I'm a guy whose a sucker for a good romance. And I don't mind long, drawn-out movies.

That said, this movie bored the farking hell out of me. It started decently enough, but the movie never picked up. The pacing was horrible. The story pulls generic plot points from a bunch of other romance movies, very few of which did the plot any better: Unhappy rich girls falls for a poor boy, to the dismay of her rich boyfriend, who (of course) is evil.. Through very little time with the poor boy, she comes to the conclusion that she fits in his world and must be with him always, despite only seeing the good things about him and the world of the less fortunate. Like most movies of it's type, it depicts poor people as fun, flamboyent people and rarely touches on the harder side of their reality, aside from the rich folk snubbing their noses toward them.

Despite flaws with such a plot, other movies have managed to make decent movies out of it. Titanic's biggest flaw is it's pacing. As I said, long movies don't bother me. If paced right, you won't even notice the time slip by. However, Titanic is just horribly slow. It's very loose and and feels like James Cameron was just taking his time with the story. Problem is the story has too many obvious flaws to be epic. It spends way too much time trying to bash it in our heads that they belong together, as if Cameron couldn't trust that DiCaprio and Winslet to convey it properly themselves. When the ship finally hits the iceburg, you find yourself brieving a sigh of relief.. Something that should not happen in a movie of this type. Instead of feeling a sense of loss in the tragedy, you find yourself glad something is happening. After having to wade through so much crap, you become apathetic to the true story that inspired the movie. A great tragedy is reduced to a plot point to shake things up for our "heroes". Then, there's the death scene. It was inevitable, of course. To let them be together would be to actually state that they COULD work as a couple when, despite the film beating it into your head that they could, realistically you know they would never fit into each other's worlds. While that move did make sense to me, it's beyond me how treating a fictional character's death as more tragic than a ship full of real people sinking to their deaths sounded like a good idea on paper.

Overall, the film takes a really generic plot and pretends that it's an epic, creating an overy drawn out film that's just full of itself. Honestly, if Cameron had editted really tightly, it may have made a decent flick. Fantasy romances are what Disney has built an empire on. It sounds dreamy and, if paced right, could possibly suck you into the illusion. Unfortunately for Titanic, Cameron gave it alot more time than it deserved, giving the viewer plenty of time to realize how insanely ridiculous it is.

As for the alternate ending..

On Disc Two is Alternate Ending: "Brock's Epiphany" (9:15) which was actually the original ending of the film. As explained by Cameron in the optional commentary, he was trying to wrap up everything for all the characters and in doing so, told too much. Not only is it inferior to ending we know, it's so schmaltzy that it gives a horrifying glimpse of what it may've looked like if Steven Spielberg had directed this film.

http://dvd.ign.com/articles/660/660963p2.html