It is a story almost as old as the century. It has been told many times, many ways.

With the release today of James Cameron's three-and-a-quarter hour magnum opus, we have finally an account as extraordinary as the Titanic itself.

It was in April 1912 that the so-called ship of dreams, the unsinkable seaborne palace that was Titanic, struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage.

Of the 2,200 people on board, more than 1,500 drowned in the freezing north Atlantic.

There were lifeboats on board for only half that number; some of those left almost empty.

That much is history. But fact is no more than a backdrop to the epic - and I mean epic - love story which Cameron has constructed on board the Titanic's decks.

It is a masterpiece of audience manipulation. Cameron's fictitious characters are as real to us - perhaps more so - than the figures from history who populate the crew's quarters. And although the film's climax is a matter of record, we do not know how the story will end.

The narrative opens not in 1912 but in the present. A fortune hunter named Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) leads an expedition to salvage items from the ship's wreckage.

His robot cameras find a rotted grand piano, a chandelier, and a skull. One can scarcely comprehend the loss of humanity that cold night.

Principally, Lovett is after a long-lost and immensely valuable diamond called The Heart of the Ocean. He doesn't find it but he does find a safe full of preserved charcoal drawings, which are seen on TV by a lady of more than 100 years, Rose DeWitt Bukater (Gloria Stuart).

The two meet, and Rose transports Lovett and his crew back through the years. This is her story.

In 1912, Rose, now played by Kate Winslet, is a 17- year-old upper-class American whose family has a good name but no money and who is being transported, against her will, back from England to start married life with an old-money heir called Cal Hockley (Billy Zane).

Also on board is a penniless young artist, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio, looking, frankly, too young and pretty for the part) who has won his ticket in a poker game.

Dawson is travelling in the Titanic's rat-ridden steerage cabins. Separation of the classes was a way of life in Edwardian society and the Titanic, we are reminded, was designed and constructed to physically keep them apart.

Rose and Jack are star-crossed lovers. They meet when he stops her from jumping off the side. Their relationship is impossible but passion draws them together as certainly as night follows day.

This is a richly characterised, wholly believable relationship. Whatever the qualms about DiCaprio's appearance, there is undeniably chemistry between him and Winslet. An hour and three-quarters is spent exploring it, by which time we have long ceased to care about the Heart of the Ocean; even the discovery of the iceberg seems almost an irrelevance.

Cameron does, however, plant hints about complacency in the Titanic's construction and captaincy which leave us in no doubt as to who he's blaming.

The captain, we learn, was persuaded to speed up through the iceberg-infested waters, just to cut the time to New York; the lookout men denied binoculars because no-one had found where they'd been stowed.

The collision with the iceberg, and the later discovery that the ship is doomed, turns Titanic, to some extent, into a disaster movie, but there are no Stallone-type heroics from the leading man; just craven cowardice from some of the crew. "Keep order here, or I'll shoot you like dogs," says a stiff upper-lipped twit of an officer on the deck as the passengers scramble for the lifeboats.

If you want to find flaws in the film, you could argue that some of these latter details could not have been known by Rose, from whose perspective history is unfolding. But really, if you are looking for lapses in a film such as this, you're too cynical by half.

As the Titanic broke in half and slipped down to its grave, 1,500 souls lay in the water. Twenty lifeboats were nearby but only one went back. As the enormity of it all seizes you, you will feel anger and sadness but above all you will feel that you have been at first hand witness to an experience you will not soon forget.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.