Not sinking but soaring - why West Sussex star Kate Winslet's Titanic adventure is still cinema gold

It’s a quarter of a century since director James Cameron’s cinematic version of Titanic set sail on our screens. It’s a huge relief – and a total delight (if you can say that about a disaster movie) that it has lost absolutely none of its power in the 25 years since.

Not many films can pass the 2 hour 30 minute mark with increasing returns. Very, very few can breach three hours. Titanic is one such film, but its sheer familiarity makes it unlikely to be something you will shove on the telly terribly often. The fact is that it cries out for the big screen – and that’s what it so brilliantly gets to mark its landmark (if only there had been a landmark, you might say) anniversary.

So many things contribute towards making a cinematic epic – and pretty near the top of the list is the quality of the effects Cameron conjured for his Titanic. Just once or twice the sweeping shots across the busy decks look just a little like someone’s computer screen, but otherwise it is superbly done – and patiently done. Cameron gives himself time to build his great adventure, bringing the personalities on board to life just as he gives full life too to the immensity of the ship they are sailing on. And that’s what carries us to the film’s heart-breaking, prolonged and grisly ending.

25 years ago, I saw it for the first time in a cinema in Colchester, long since gone. I remember being pretty much the only bloke in there. The sniffing started with about three-quarters of an hour to go; with poor shivering Leo clinging to Rose’s make-shift life raft, it upped considerably; then when Leo was loosened to sink down into his watery grave, it became a torrent. I thought we were going to be swept away by an Essex tidal wave – and that we would float away on the debris rather as Kate and Leo had just done.

25 years later, it’s a film which has absolutely still got that visceral oomph – because Cameron’s patience and his technical wizardly all those years ago were capped, and indeed still are, by two superb central performances of astonishing charisma and vitality.

West Sussex-based star Kate Winslet is mesmerising as Rose, the poor little rich girl, her heart breaking as she is shipped off to the States for marriage to an absolute brute she loathes. She needs to soar – and its Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson who sets her free, the easy-going chancer who knows that when you have got absolutely nothing, then you have got absolutely nothing to lose. Rose is the trapped bird in the gilded cage; Jack is the untamed spirit she needs. Their love affair is beautifully evoked – all the more so for the fact that we know that it is utterly doomed. DiCaprio looks like he has just taken a couple of weeks off school to make the film; Winslet is freshness itself. There is huge chemistry between them both as tragedy engulfs nearly everyone.

Nothing about the film has aged. Its resurrection on the big screen for its 25th anniversary underlines the fact that it is one of the great all-time screen classics.