‘Actually dared to be innocent about love’

But not everyone appreciated such a soapy romp; it also drew enormous ire from Cameron’s fans.

Bear in mind that up until this point, his most romantic film moment had involved Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger dancing a tango before going off to blow up spies. It took barely a month for the backlash to begin. In 2012, Entertainment Weekly observed that Titanic was the first film to fall victim to online “hater culture.” It was, wrote critic Owen Gleiberman, “a huge, powerful, ambitious movie, by a geek-god filmmaker, that actually dared to be innocent about love. For if there’s one thing that internet culture, with its immersion in hipness, control, technology, and a certain masculine mystique that binds all those things together, cannot abide, it is romantic innocence.”

Titanic fans’ ardour can seem a bit extreme to the uninitiated. Devotees have long argued over whose hand it was up against the steaming cab window during Rose and Jack’s sex scene, and how either could possibly have moved that way given they were at a completely different angle shortly afterward. And an internet theory, showing how Jack and Rose could both have fitted on that board in the icy Atlantic, was so hotly contested that the TV science show Mythbusters debunked it, concluding that it could only have been possible had they used Rose’s life-jacket for buoyancy.

“I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later,” Cameron told Vanity Fair this very week, presumably while staring at the ceiling and mouthing “spare me.” He added: “But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die. Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless ... The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”

Titanic, currently berthed at Netflix, deserves very much to be looked on again. From the moment Rose emerges from under her giant hat, to her elder self being reunited with Jack, and all those who died, forever this time, you are completely and utterly under their spell. Joy, romance and hope have a place in our biggest stories, even if — and maybe especially if — they involve disaster. Cameron was right. It’s not physics — it’s art.

THINGS HAPPEN FOR ARTISTIC REASONS, NOT FOR PHYSICS REASONS.