Okay, So James Cameron’s Scientific “Titanic” Door Study Proved It’s Possible That Jack Could’ve Survived After All
Titanic (the movie) turned 25 this past December, and leading up to its anniversary, its director James Cameron has been talking a lot about it. James already let us know that Leonardo DiCaprio almost didn’t play Jack because he wasn’t interested in auditioning. And then, last month, it was announced that James had conducted an extremely important study to prove that there’s no way Jack could’ve survived if Rose made room for him on that door. And he put theories to the test in a new National Geographic special that shows Rose was not just being selfish and using Jack for conversation until the lifeboats arrived. And well, James was wrong because there is a way that Jack could’ve lived BUT…
In the upcoming special Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron, Entertainment Weekly reports a multitude of scenarios were tested with scientists and two stunt people to see if there was a way for Jack and Rose to survive the aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking. What James discovered during the first test is they could have both fit on the door, but their lower bodies would have turned into popsicles which eventually would have killed them. In the second scenario, they could have kept their upper bodies afloat for a few hours but probably not long enough for survival. But it was the final scenario that made the most sense, yet since Jack was so whipped after Rose gave him some of that Heart of the Ocean lovin’, he would have never let that happen in the first place.
For the final test, the actors perform all of the physically strenuous actions Jack and Rose went through prior to finding the floating door — including the scene where another passenger tries to use Rose as a floatation device, only to be met with a heavy blow from Jack’s fist. They also add an extra moment that didn’t happen in the film, as the Rose in the experiment gives Jack a life jacket for added protection.
“He’s stabilized,” Cameron observes. “He got into a place where if we projected that out, he just might’ve made it until the lifeboat got there. Jack might’ve lived, but there’s a lot of variables. I think his thought process was, ‘I’m not going to do one thing that jeopardized her,’ and that’s 100 percent in character.”
.@GMA FIRST LOOK: @natgeo special “Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron” will settle the debate once and for all: could Jack have survived?@JimCameron@natgeotv pic.twitter.com/OkKCXaEkvF
— Good Morning America (@GMA) February 2, 2023
I guess the true moral of the story here is don’t stow away onto boats you don’t have tickets for. Still, it’s nice to know they could have both survived for a little bit, even though had Jack and Rose made it to the lifeboats together, they would have only grown into the couple from Revolution Road and hated each other for the rest of their lives.
Pic: 20th Century Fox