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The footage on this Titanic doc's 3D Blu-ray is astonishing, but with a 45-minute running time, is it worth the investment....?
A&E / 45 Minutes / 2011 / Unrated / Street Date: August 14, 2012
Titanic mania is back in vogue, as proven by a surprising number of DVD and Blu-ray (and 3D Blu-ray!) titles that have popped onto the market to exploit it. It was Jimmy Cameron's high-def release that provided the biggest shock wave in this regard - if you can find viewership in the wake of Leo and Kate going down with the ship, why not? - but more off-beat titles like Titanic: 100 Years in 3D have merits, as well, though in terms of this one, it may not be as must-see as other editions focusing on the famous wreck.
What Titanic: 100 Years in 3D offers is a quiet, solemn, state-of-the-art look at what that boat looks like in the year 2010. We get a bit of a background into just how impressive the mega-cameras that filmed this endeavor really were (and the tricks involved with plummeting them a couple miles under the surface of the ocean), but mostly this short doc treats us to lingering shots of once-fancy relics now crusted with the underwater sands of time: via interview subjects and actors narrating thoughts as real-life members of the ship's crew, we get a snapshot of what might have been and what now is at the bottom of the sea.
But after Titanic and its copious bonus features on Blu-ray, and then Ghosts of the Abyss (which also got a significant BD release this season), Titanic: 100 Years in 3D seems pretty ancillary by comparison. There's no question that the footage here is intrinsically fascinating - the 3D element of it is replicated solidly on this disc - but there's only so much you can do in 45 minutes. Unfortunately, one ends up wishing a program such as this ended up as a bonus feature on Ghost of the Abyss' release rather than a bonus-free edition on its own.