'Titanic' Fan Spots Hilariously Bad Detail You Definitely Missed In 1997

“Titanic” fans will never let go of this one.

A TikToker shared a very funny moment from the movie that highlights how much visual effects have developed since James Cameron’s drama premiered in 1997.

The scene involves an establishing shot of the upper deck of the Titanic’s bow. But once the camera begins panning and then zooming in on passengers walking around on the ship, things start to look a little off. It soon becomes glaringly obvious that the entire scene was done in CGI.

“It’s fake as fuck,” you can hear the TikToker who shared the scene say as they cackle in the background.

“Now they’re real,” the observer says before the CGI versions of the ship’s captain (Bernard Hill) and a crew member suddenly become the actual actors who portrayed them in the film.

Fellow TikTokers were equally tickled by the outdated visual effects.

“It’s giving The Polar Express motion capture animation,” quipped one user in the comments section.

“It looks like The Sims on a boat,” added another.

Other fans were sympathetic to the fact that this type of CGI was actually state-of-the-art technology at the time. One wrote: “This was legit cutting edge in the late ’90s, I remember watching behind the scenes clips raving about how realistic this was.”

“Our good TVs are ruining movies,” said another commenter.

This is also not the first time someone on TikTok has pointed out this badly aged scene.

In 2021, another user posted the same clip with overlaying text that reads: “How have I NEVER noticed this before?”

Cameron has always been pretty public about the use of special effects in “Titanic.” In 2022, he explained to GQ that he had the option to build an actual, floating replica of the Titanic for the film. But when he realized that he’d only have one take to film the “$10 million” replica of the Titanic sinking, he came up with another idea. Cameron decided to build a studio on a bluff in Baja, Mexico, that overlooked the water, and filmed simpler set pieces.

“And then we’d use, obviously, digital composites for other shots,” Cameron said. “Shoot people on blue screens, green screens, all that sort of thing.”

In 1997, Cameron also indulged film critic Roger Ebert in explaining how he pulled off the movie’s special effects in a piece Ebert wrote about the film at the time.

Ebert noted how in awe he was of a shot in the film in which the ship is shown “from bow to stern, every foot of it, with flags flying and smoke coiling from its stacks, and on the deck hundreds of passengers strolling, children running, servants serving, sportsmen playing.”

“I watched it because I knew, logically, that this shot was a special effect,” Ebert wrote. “I knew, in general, what to look for - what trickery might be involved - and yet I was fooled. The shot looks like the real thing.”

Cameron explained to Ebert that it was a “model shot.”

“The people were all computer graphics,” Cameron said. “The way we did it was, we had people act out all of those individual behaviors in what we call a ‘motion capture environment.’ So, a steward pouring tea for a lady seated on a deck chair - that was all acted out and then that motion file was used to drive and animate those figures. The end result is like you said: We pull back down the full length of Titanic, and you see 350 people all over the decks, doing all those different things. The same technique was used for the sinking, when you see hundreds of people on the ship jumping off or rolling down the decks.”

And although Cameron’s techniques have been public for 25 years — and “Avatar: The Way of Water” is proof that the filmmaker has always been a pioneer in the cutting edge of visual effects — it’s still really fun to watch younger generations notice and share these hilarious gems.