Film Theory: Titanic is about Time Travel... No REALLY!

one silver lining to fewer movies coming out this year a chance to theorize about some of the best classics of yesteryear take for instance the hottest movie from when i was in middle school titanic it's got everything you'd hope for in a summer blockbuster iconic lines romance time travel wait time travel [Music] hello internet welcome to film theory the show where i'll never let go i'll never let go of theories about movies that were released before most of the people watching this video were born seems like every year i have a good excuse to use this tweet can't do this anymore and who boy was 2020 the peak year to exemplify that feeling so instead this holiday season i wanted to take us all on a quick trip back in time to the year 1997. things were just simpler back then games had just started breaking out into the third dimension it was literally impossible to be on the phone and on the internet at the same time and there were only three star wars movies it was also a time where i owned zero pairs of jeans it's not to say that jeans weren't commonly available there was just a period of time in my life where i thought it was a good idea to wear suit pants but anyway it is hard to state how big of a movie james cameron's titanic was back in 1997. when this thing was released titanic was the most expensive movie ever made but it also became the highest grossing movie ever made being the first film to ever break the one billion dollars earned at the box office mark and remember we're talking about 1997 money here and it stayed on top of that leaderboard until a different james cameron movie about weird blue aliens came along to beat it it has the record of being nominated for the most oscars winning the most oscars the theme song my heart'll go on was the most played song on the radio for 10 straight weeks which honestly in my memory feels too low because you could not step into a circuit city in the late 90s and not hear that song and even though titanic runs at a hefty three hours and 14 minutes which fun fact was a very specific time because it was the exact time it took the ship to sync in real life it's also the digits of pi people still went to see it in the theaters over and over and over again even though there were no super villains in it unless of course you count the iceberg hashtag historical spoilers my point is that titanic was a dominating cultural force and i get that this channel tends to work best when i focus on animated stuff and superheroes but man this is a movie that we need to talk about and it's not like i haven't been asked to either i get a lot of requests to cover whether leonardo dicaprio's character of jack could have fit on the floating rubble that saved his girlfriend rose but i've shied away from that theory because one mythbusters already did a deep dive into the topic i've watched enough episodes of deadliest catch to know that when you plunge yourself into cold water without a survival suit you're gonna freeze to death pretty darn soon but also number two the question is missing the point entirely jack had to die jack wanted to die because jack is a time traveler i know i know that sounds crazy but it's true jack on the titanic is a time traveler who was there on the boat to make sure that the titanic sank and if you think that's a hot take just you wait cause this episode is gonna get steamier than the window of jack and rose's make-out mobile so put on your life jackets theorists cause today we're plunging into the icy iceberg infested waters of titanic's time travel now in order to follow this theory and several of the references i just made to titanic you need to have a good idea of how the movie goes so here's a quick and spoiler heavy recap for you in the 1990s a team of scientists is excavating the wreckage of titanic a massive passenger ship which crashed 85 years before during their search they find an old brand unsafe drawing of a lady named rose wearing a necklace that contains a massive diamond named the heart of the ocean and as luck would have it she's still alive and can tell him the story of the titanic's cursed voyage from there most of the rest of the movie just boils down to rose telling her tale how she boarded the titanic with her rich fiance cal who is just the worst human being and how to get out of her miserable relationship she decided to jump overboard to kill herself however as she's about to do it she's spotted by jack a poor third class passenger who's only on the titanic because he won a ticket in a poker game jack is charming enough that it makes rose not want to die and it doesn't take long for her to realize that she likes jack's nude illustrations and below deck drinking parties a whole heck of a lot more than her fiance's misogyny then the boat hits a huge ice cube and breaks in half there aren't enough lifeboats for everybody so rose ends up floating on a piece of debris while jack chills out in the water literally it turns out submerging yourself in icy water is bad for you so jack freezes to death while rose is rescued when one of the lifeboats turns around and picks her up at the end of her life she dumps the heart of the ocean back into the sea because um because uh it's a symbol or something of her love of jack and then she dies cause she real old the end now titanic as a whole is an entertaining love story and it has the added bonus of leonardo dicaprio chasing after a young woman just like in his real life only this time it's age appropriate but what isn't as immediately apparent about this story is that jack isn't just a poor third class passenger jack is a time traveler specifically on the boat to complete a mission oh yeah now we're getting into the crazy pills territory of this theory but it's not crazy at all when you think about the things that jack says that no one from 1912 could possibly know let's look at a few examples as he's freezing to death in the north atlantic jack accurately predicts rose's fate you're gonna die an old lady warm in her bed all right all right that one's a little bit tongue-in-cheek it's a last-minute pep talk as you're on the verge of death no problem but how about one of the very first things that jack mentions to rose when he discovers her dangling over the railing of the ship i remember when i was a kid me and my father we went ice fishing out on lake with soda seems plausible enough right nothing out of the ordinary there well this conversation between jack and rose is happening in april of 1912 but lake wisoda is a man-made lake which was created between 1915 and 1917. even if jack is lying about the memory there's no way that he could know the name of a lake that didn't exist yet and this also isn't the only time it happens he does it again when he's telling rose about their imaginary trip to the santa monica pier ride on the roller coaster till we throw up not necessarily the most charming pitch for a date but that's missing the point he's referring to the blue streak racer roller coaster which wasn't on the santa monica pier until 1917 and it's not just things that jack says either when he and fabrizio are rushing to board the titanic we see fabrizio carrying this bag that bag is called a moose sack and here's where i'll pause moment to let you giggle about that and also give you a moment to subscribe to the channel help push us over the 10 million subscriber mark we good alright so that rucksack became popular after its initial use as a pack for the swedish military in world war ii starting in 1939. even if jack had been guessing about future roller coasters and man-made lakes how on earth does he have a physical item that wasn't produced until 27 years after he died unless he's hopping timelines how does jack have this power why would he go back in time and the most important question of all why did he choose that haircut if he was trying to blend into the scenery in 1912. now hold on you stalwart advocates of occam's razor are probably saying isn't there a simpler explanation here that rose is just making jack up after all as one of the researchers mentions to rose at the end of the movie we never found anything on jack there's no record of him at all but as rose says there shouldn't be records of him because jack never purchased his own ticket which he didn't he won them playing poker in a bar five minutes before the ship left all the more reason the dude is a time traveler leaves no trace of his existence gets on the boat via a fluke chance of luck right before it takes off and let's be honest if rose were making jack up who drew the sexy time picture of her that they found in the safe he definitely existed and he definitely is a time traveler heck if you need further proof look no further than the movie's director james cameron writer and director of iconic science fiction films like aliens the abyss avatar elita battle angel mastermind behind other time travel classics like the terminator and terminator 2. look at the dude's entire filmography everything is sci-fi and action you know the one movie that just doesn't make sense titanic until you consider that it's low-key a sci-fi time travel movie so whether you buy into that or not just go with me on this why why would a time traveler go back to the titanic just have a fling with this rich girl only to die in the end and why wouldn't he choose to i don't know save the freaking boat if he knew what was coming well you see one thing that's undeniable is that jack saving rose changes the course of history if jack doesn't see rose stepping over the rail and she actually jumps the titanic doesn't sink consider this once her fiance cal or her mother notices that she's missing they'd report it to the crew at which point standard procedure is to turn the boat around and attempt a search and rescue but the titanic is a big ship that you can't just throw in reverse so in order to go back and search for rose they'd likely need to make what's called a williamson turn which is a teardrop shaped maneuver that large ships use to reverse course and requires a significant detour and then there's the actual search what matters here isn't whether the search and rescue is successful what matters is the change of timing changing the course of the ship alone is time consuming the official inquiry into the crash found that it took over 30 seconds and nearly half a kilometer for the ship to turn 22 and a half degrees in an attempt to avoid the iceberg so doing a full 180 degree loop is gonna take several minutes the ship then has to retrace its path back once they discover rose is missing and then there's the time of the actual search and rescue it's impossible to come up with an exact figure of how much of a delay rose jumping overboard would cause but if we're considering the bare minimum of 15 minutes to turn the ship around and go back to the point of rose's disappearance a shockingly cursory 30-minute search and then another 15 minutes to get back on course we're looking at at least an hour of delay which again realistically i think it would have been much longer than that even one hour though changes history because icebergs travel in the water on average about 0.7 kilometers every hour and often faster than that depending on the current so it's safe to say that the iceberg which sank the titanic in real life would have been thousands of feet away if the titanic had been delayed by an hour or more with no iceberg to hit the ship now enters new york harbor safely and rose's death ends up saving 1500 lives suck on that butterfly effect ashton kutcher so then jack was real but also a time traveler who saved rose to make sure that 1500 other innocent people would die why would he travel back in time to ensure the destruction of the boat rather than prevent it well maybe it's not that simple maybe jack dawson was sacrificing the 1500 lives lost on the titanic to save a million lives and preserve the course of history hear me out on this one let's say the titanic hadn't sunk rose jumps overboard the ship is delayed it misses the iceberg and the titanic is now the new fad in transatlantic travel it travels back and forth between new york and southampton carrying thousands and thousands of passengers until one day in 1914 or 1915 it's torpedoed and sunk by a german submarine killing the thousands of people on board now while that might seem like it's coming out of nowhere like it is completely random we actually have ourselves a historical comparison in may of 1915 the british passenger ship lusitania was sunk by a german u-boat killing over a thousand people including 128 americans and the lusitania was attacked just off the southern coast of ireland which is right on the route titanic was taking between southampton and new york so we know that the german navy would have been in the area with an opportunity to sink the titanic now in 1915 the united states was neutral in the recently started world war one though they were helping to supply the british using ships like the lusitania to do so but germany declared the waters around the united kingdom and ireland a war zone and while it's speculation to say that they would have torpedoed the titanic let's just say that their history of being perfectly honorable in world wars wasn't exactly stellar the sinking of the lusitania raised anti-german sentiment among americans but the us still stayed out of the war until 1917 as part of a surge that ultimately won the war for the allies but if it had been the titanic rather than the lusitania there would probably have been many more americans on board and if there were no war material on board the unprovoked nature of the attack would have been too egregious for president woodrow wilson to keep the us out of the war after all history has shown us that american sentiment can turn to war when it perceives an unprovoked attack against the country like pearl harbor the sinking of the main or entering the war in iraq so the titanic sinking via iceberg kept us out of world war 1 maybe so what big deal the us was instrumental in the allied forces winning the war so why would it matter well it's true the u.s was mostly successful in world war one but most historians agree that joining world war one in its early stages say 1914 or 1915 rather than when we actually entered in 1917 would have been disastrous for the united states the standing army of the us in 1915 was smaller and less experienced than the forces from the major players in world war one but also smaller and less experienced than the forces of bulgaria and greece the main opponent of the united states in the war germany had an army 20 times the size of the us's at that point to position the united states as an international power many american politicians led a campaign known as the preparedness movement in the early days of world war one to increase the size of the military train them more thoroughly and invest in updates to equipment and machinery the gradual onset of this program proved useful for the us in the later days of the war but if the u.s had entered the war in its early stages it's likely the preparedness movement would have enacted their plan to draft 600 000 young men annually and send them to the front lines immediately without adequate time to prepare them proper equipment to send them to battle with and only rudimentary scouting of the war front in western europe american casualties likely would have skyrocketed as world war 1 played out in history the us lost approximately 116 000 men in the last stages of the war if the u.s had joined earlier though with mobilized but untrained troops fighting in the trenches it's likely that that number of casualties would have been closer to austria-hungary's 1.1 million deaths france's 1.4 million or germany's whopping 2 million heck the war may have even been lost as american troops and supplies get burned out early rather than giving the allied forces a late game boost to carry them over the victory line so let's take that all back to titanic though jack's decision to save rose caused the titanic to sink and cost 1500 people their lives he may have done it to save the united states from a timeline that would have cost them over 1 million lives and with that kind of decimation who knows how the u.s turns out for the remainder of the 20th century maybe americans never land on the moon never become world leaders in information technology or worst of all never develop the world's premier film market that can afford to fund a 200 million movie to give leonardo dicaprio his big break that's right friends leonardo dicaprio's character is a time traveler who made sure the titanic sinks to prevent an alternate history where the career of actor leonardo dicaprio never exists but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cuts [Music] you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 3,454,970

Rating: 4.8823099 out of 5

Keywords: titanic, titanic movie, titanic theory, titanic full movie, titanic song, my heart will go one, titanic door, the titanic, titanic scene, el titanic, go on titanic, film titanic, titanic espanol, my heart will go on titanic, theory titanic, titanic history, time travel, time lord, history, leonardo dicaprio, kate winslet, jack and rose, jack and rose scene, king of the world scene, film theory, film theorists, matpat

Id: g4tPO8tuP9E

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Nemoitto]

That was actually well done. I love these film theory vids.

[u/K9Thefirst1]

Rather disappointed actually - and I'm a fan of MatPat.

For one thing, they wouldn't have just turned around to find Rose. Olympic had a (sorta) similar situation in the 1920s where a passenger disappeared from First Class mid-voyage. They let the police on board when they reached Southampton, but other than that nothing different was done by the crew.

For another, in his theory about the motive, he mentioned Lusitania. Sure, good on him bringing more attention to that event, but all he did was have Titanic and Lusitania swap places in history. Hardly anything that would have caused the US to enter WWI early.

I was hoping he'd pull one of his fun Canon Welding theories given that he was going hard on the James Cameron angle. Like, sinking the Titanic was an assassination attempt on the grandfather of one of Skynet's creators, thus preventing the Machine War.

Well, that's partly true. I was mostly hoping he'd use high school math and ten minutes looking into the SOP for emergency maneuvers for the Merchant Marine to prove that ramming the iceberg is an asinine load of bullcrap.

[u/[deleted]]

What always struck me as odd was, how Bioshock Infinite - a game not about time travel specifically, but close enough - also was set in 1912 out of all possibilities. Can't get rid of the feeling that this was meant as a nod to the movie, and theories like this one. (MatPat is by far not the first one to bring that up.)

[u/CaptainRichardRIII]

Ooh yes I watch now

[u/Jermaphobe456]

Someone please tell MattPat to shut up....

[u/K9Thefirst1]

He presumedly asses it would be a case of Titanic AND Lusitania sinking... Which doesn't make sense, given what Germany's response was to the sinking of Lusitania.

[u/ZookeepergameTrue681]

He made some major jumps in logic, first assuming that the titanic would have been a passenger ship during the first world war(when both her sister ships served in the military) and then believing that the US would have gone to war right away, when it took years after the sinking of the Lusitania before they joined the war