Titanic journey in 3D

Directed by James Cameron in 3D IMAX, which gives an astonishing impression of looking through a window rather than at a screen, this film is an amazing feat of engineering as well as discovery.

Cameron, his actor pal Bill Paxton and a crew of scientific boffins descended in mini-subs two-andahalf miles to the Atlantic seabed, where Titanic's wreck lies in a shroud of barnacles and rust.

Then they sent two robot cameras into the hulk and made an amazing inventory of some of the glories that have defied the disaster and the depths.

Stained-glass windows in the first-class lounge; someone's bowler hat left behind; the tumbler beside a water pitcher from which a hastily departing guest took her last drink before the great torrent rushed in; the brass bedstead of the "unsinkable" Molly Brown (survivor); the captain's bath-tub; and the whole breathtaking extravagance of the most elegant ocean liner ever built by man and destroyed by God.

There is no sense of grave-robbing: all 1,500 victims have "biodegraded", so to speak, as the liner itself is doing.

Cameron reconstructs life aboard in the shape of living tableaux of passengers and crew, seen in spectral mode, eating, drinking, dancing or just promenading among the watery remnants of their vessel. It is done with finesse and, oddly, is deeply touching.

For me, it held a family memory. Thomas Andrews, who designed the Titanic, was a distant cousin of my grandfather.

He always comes well out of the catastrophe, calculating the minutes left for his liner before she went down, as I recall my grandfather doing if the sermons in our Presbyterian church overran. Neither liked to be kept waiting.