`TITANIC' LURCHES ALONG WITH SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Talk about an engineering marvel. Jim Cameron has tooled his super-expensive, dauntingly long ``Titanic'' into a movie with something for everybody.

There's cool high-tech stuff for guys. There's an endless, moon-eyed romance for gals. Mass death and destruction should satisfy whichever kids that cute Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't. And to top off all of this canny commercial calculating, there's a breathtakingly satisfying, mythic-mystical touch that only the director of ``Aliens'' and ``Terminator 2'' could pull off.

As for filmmaking artistry, ``Titanic'' does all right in the historic detail and impressive scope departments. Cameron spared no expense - $200 million at last count, the most ever for a Hollywood film - to re-create the world's most famous luxury liner, then destroy it step by agonizing step. His stated goal was to settle the audience into the lap of R.M.S. Titanic's luxury, then drop them into a freezing North Atlantic. At this, he succeeds utterly.

Cameron's effort to tell a stirring human story, however, gets soggy pretty fast - then keeps slogging along for half the movie's three-hour-plus length, until that iceberg mercifully comes along and saves the show.

The plot has been characterized as ``Romeo and Juliet go boating,'' but the writing quality is more Barbara Cartland than Shakespeare. Add a class conflict angle that's about as sophisticated as an Uncle Scrooge cartoon, and you have a lot of bilge that the movie still manages to pump its way past.

Things commence with a bracing blast of Cameron-style wowie cinema. Seamlessly combining tank shots, computer-generated imaging and actual underwater footage of the Titanic wreck, we explore the haunting hulk of man's Industrial Age arrogance. We're with modern-day salvage operator Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), who's searching for a priceless necklace but comes up with a sketch of a nude babe instead.

A 101-year-old woman catches a broadcast about the drawing and helicopters out to Lovett's barge, claiming she was the model. There was no record of this Rose Dawson on the Titanic's passenger or survivor manifests, but she's nice and spunky and played with touching grace by Gloria Stuart, one of Hollywood's more vibrant '30s starlets, who hasn't made a movie in 50 years.

And, naturally, she's got quite a tale to tell.

Fade back 85 years. DiCaprio plays the greatest guy of 1912, a sensitive and free-spirited and (most important) cute American artist named Jack Dawson. He's been knocking around Europe, penniless but happily; when he and his expendable Italian buddy (Danny Nucci) win steerage tickets on the Titanic's maiden voyage, well, that's something he's just got to experience.

Paying through the nose for a posher passage is despicable rich guy Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). He's got his rebellious teen-age fiancee Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet) and her starchy mother Ruth (Frances Fisher) in tow. Rose would rather kill herself than marry the snooty twit; when Jack coaxes her back from the stern rail, it's obvious that they'll share a love that will somehow mean more than the 1,500 lives that are about to be lost.

For the next hour, Rose and Jack explore one another while making the secondary discoveries that rich people are awful and the poorer passengers are wonderful. Some of this is rather sweet; DiCaprio and Winslet are talented actors, and they don't let the obviousness of Cameron's scenario nor the flatness of his jokes defeat them.

And yes, just when you don't think you can take another expression of teen-age affection or upper-class venality, we get a good look at the sketching session. After all, PG-13 rating or no, Cameron is first and foremost a showman.

It's nonetheless a relief when the great ship starts taking on water. Rose and Jack still act like lovestruck ninnies, and as the situation grows ever more dire, Cal just gets worse (how, with all the attention to detail he lavishedol on this film, Cameron neglected to supply Zane with a Snidely Whiplash moustache to twirl is, perhaps, the movie's biggest mystery).

But as the ship sinks, Cameron also acknowledges that more than the problems of three little people are at stake. In hundreds of quick, telling shots, ranging in tone from cliched melodrama to primal acts of compassion, fear, sacrifice and selfishness, he fashions a kaleidoscope of mass tragedy like nothing that's ever quite been filmed before.

Similarly, there is no precedent for the film's horrific depiction of the Titanic's final death throes. After all the souls we've seen dispatched on screen, in bloody close-up or at a cynically sanitized distance, it is still astonishing to watch representations of what we know were real people, turned into human pinballs and icicles.

And after presenting such a devastating array of death, Cameron finally employs his greatest writing gifts, impossibly but effectively turning ``Titanic'' into a resonant hymn to life. Defying us to forgive all the excess and hokum that's gone into this mad movie gamble, Cameron ultimately rises above the flaws and calculations on a few gasps of real artistry.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Titanic'' (PG-13; violence, nudity, sex, language, children in jeopardy).

The stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Gloria Stuart, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bill Paxton and David Warner.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by James Cameron. Produced by Cameron and Jon Landau. Released by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox.

Running time: Three hours, 14 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Jack (Leonardo DeCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) fall in love against the backdrop of the world's greatest sea disaster in ``Titanic.''