YMMV / Raise the Titanic!

• Awesome Music: Written by John Barry, the score is one of the movie's highlights and considered some of Barry's best work.
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: The Titanic finally arriving in New York, 68 years late, but finally at her destination. The entire city has come out to see the magnificent vessel.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The plot of the film involves an element that will help the USA fend off a nuclear missile attack from Soviet Russia in the middle of the Cold War. One of this film's stars Jason Robards would go on a few years later to appear in The Day After, a film that became infamous for its stark depiction of a nuclear holocaust, a Cold War concern particularly heightened in the mid-'80s.
  • The fact that, after the wreck was actually found in 1985, five years after this film's release, it is now known that the real-life ship can not only not be raised, but is broken in two and will most likely decay to nothing and collapse within the next few decades.
  • One of the submersibles implodes while searching for Titanic. In 2023, a submersible that was being used to bring tourists to the wreck, named Titan, went missing. It was later confirmed that it imploded.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The SEALs in the book carry M-24 automatic guns, a fictional weapon at the year 1976, in which the novel was written. In 1988, one year after the time the book is set, the US Army introduced a real rifle named M-24 (although it's not automatic, but a sniper rifle).
  • In the film, the searchers realize they're getting close to Titanic when they find one of the funnels. This isn't far off from what actually happened when the wreck was found: Robert Ballard and his crew came across one of the ship's distinctive boilers.
  • Michael Ensign plays one of the Starfish crew who is killed when the submersible implodes. He would be killed by Titanic again by appearing in James Cameron's film as Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the most famous people to go down with the ship.
• Nightmare Fuel: The submersible Starfish springing a leak at 12,000ft and then imploding.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • With regards to the film, the scene where the Titanic is raised is frequently cited to be the only real reason to watch the movie.^note Made more impressive given the limitations of special effects at the time, and knowing how difficult and expensive it thus was to shoot. Indeed, you get to see it twice (it's repeated in slow motion behind the end credits).
  • Sir Alec Guinness's appearance as a Titanic survivor.
• So Okay, It's Average: Divorced from its notoriously fraught production, the backlash from both Clive Cussler and fans of his novels, and its being one of the last gasps of the 1970s Disaster Movie with an All-Star Cast (which was on its way out in favor of the modern blockbuster), the film tends to be seen as this in retrospect. Many have noted that the film does have several genuinely good moments, such as the raising of the titular ship, its arrival in New York City, and the scenes with Pitt and Bigalow; it's just that outside of those moments the film tends to be quite slow-paced and forgettable.

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