Raise the Titanic (1980) on Netflix
PG19801h 55mActionDramaThriller
An American defense system needs byzanium, a rare mineral that went down with the Titanic. Dirk Pitt is put in charge of raising the wreck before the Soviets get to it.
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- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb5.3/106,253 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes38%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Cold War Siberia, an American spy breaks into an abandoned mine and finds a frozen American sergeant's corpse beside a marker dated 10 February 1912. His Geiger counter shows that byzanium, a rare radioactive mineral, was mined there. A Soviet soldier chases the spy out and shoots him, and the government operative Dirk Pitt shoots the soldier and brings the spy to Washington, D.C. The C.I.A. learns that Americans had worked the mine and that the ore was headed for the United States. The American Brewster packed the byzanium into wooden crates and loaded it onto the Titanic, which went down in April 1912. Pitt questions John Bigalow, a deckhand who was the last to see Brewster alive. Pitt proposes raising the wreck, and the president approves the salvage plan and puts him in charge.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Raise the Titanic (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Elliott Gould was offered a lead role in Raise the Titanic but turned it down, saying: "I don't want to raise the Titanic. Let the Titanic stay where it is".
- Clive Cussler was so disgusted with Raise the Titanic that he refused to give permission for any further film adaptations of his books, and in 2006 he sued the filmmakers of Sahara for failing to consult him on the script.
- Novelist Larry McMurtry, who called Cussler's novel "less a novel than a manual on how to raise a very large boat from deep beneath the sea", says he was one of about 17 writers on the screenplay and the only one who did not petition for a credit.
- An old Greek ocean liner, SS Athinai was converted into a replica of the Titanic; the film showed the ship intact, but in 1985 the real wreck was found and confirmed the Titanic had broken up and lay in two pieces.
- A 10-tonne, 50 ft scale model was built for the scene where the Titanic is raised to the surface; costing $7 million, it initially proved too large for any existing water tank.
- The final scene, with Alec Guinness, was to be shot at St Ives, Cornwall, but the day before the shoot St Ives had its worst storm in one hundred years, destroying the church so the scene had to be relocated.
- Admiral David Cooney, Chief of Information for the Navy, demanded the script be rewritten so the Russians did not come off smarter than the Americans.
