James Cameron: Expedition: Bismarck (2002)

Expedition: Bismarck starts in a way so many run-of-the-mill television documentaries do, and in these opening moments, you’d be forgiven for thinking the film is generic, even pedestrian.

In the opening shot, we see the raging waters of the Atlantic Ocean. We cut to a wide shot of the bow of a vessel breaking through those same waters. We cut inside the ship, where an older man wanders down the hallway towards the camera. We hear his thoughts in voiceover, speaking in German, and then in English translation, about the dedication to the flag. Which flag? A dissolve answers our question: the Nazi flag, and with another dissolve, we pass back into a recreation of the past, as young German soldiers walk down a ship hallway. We cut to another man on the bow of a vessel and hear his thoughts about hating the English despite having never met one. The screen dips to black superimposed with red and we come back to another recreation, one where a disoriented, bloodied German soldier wanders over a smoking deck of a ship, passing fallen comrades. The first notes of Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” from The Planets starts to play over the soundtrack, and we watch a submersible pass through the deep ocean waters.

Finally, we see a familiar face at the controls of the vehicle: James Cameron, the legendary director of The Terminator and Titanic, and we hear his words about the ship that he’s diving to:

You have to imagine a ship so powerful, it could bring an entire nation to its knees. For me, the Bismarck was the Death Star. It was a kind of mechanized warfare that hopefully will never exist again. It was this monstrous piece of steel that held together no matter what the British could throw at it. And when it finally sank, it became a legend with the same kind of force in the human imagination that Titanic had.

Cameron’s words begin to clarify what makes Expedition: Bismarck a Cameronesque picture, and over the next 90 minutes, we learn how this film blends tried-and-true Discovery Channel documentary conventions with some of Cameron’s unique thematic and technological obsessions. For you see, Expedition: Bismarck truly is a run-of-the-mill historical documentary made for television, but it also is an interesting portrait of James Cameron as an artist—and a scientist. It’s important to remember this second aspect of Cameron. He comes from a family of scientists and has dedicated himself to furthering filmmaking and deep-sea exploration technology; he might not be a professional scientist, but as an autodidact, he’s contributed greatly to the field of deep-sea exploration and knows far more than any layman. The film is serviceable as a historical documentary, but it grows truly fascinating for any viewer interested in Cameron and his career.

Developed in 2002 for the Discovery Channel and broadcast a little before Christmas that same year, Expedition: Bismarck tells the story of the German battleship Bismarck, which was the titan of the Nazi fleet during World War II. The film cuts between historical footage of the ship and its battles, recreations of the fateful sinking, interviews with the survivors of the German crew, and, most notably, undersea footage of Cameron’s exploration of the wreck on the bottom of the Atlantic, off the coast of France. 

The undersea footage is remarkable and it’s worth noting how stunning moments of the film are when it’s simply illuminating the sunken wreck. Individual shots, such as a view of sea anemones thriving on the secondary turrets, or a lone boot on the ocean floor marking the only gravestone of a lost soldier, show the way that the wreck is a memorial to death as well as an example of how life thrives in the darkest of places in the natural world. A scientist studying rusticles even emphasizes this point in dialogue. The undersea footage alone justifies the film’s existence.

When the film isn’t underwater, the style is standard made-for-TV documentary: the use of archival footage from news reels and propaganda features; the hazy camerawork of the recreations, utilizing alternating shutter speeds; the steel-blue tint of these same scenes; the bombastic and repetitive music, such as the frequent use of Holst’s The Planets; the visually blown-out interviews in gardens or dens, where old men, including Bismarck survivors Karl Kuhn and Walter Weintz, recount the past; and Lance Henriksen’s grave narration about the Bismarck being a monstrosity of war. 

There are the occasional artistic flourishes within its conventional framework. For instance, the sequence of archival footage of Nazi and Hitler Youth rallies portrays Hitler as a demonic rock star, the pulsing heavy metal anthem and Henriksen’s narration likening the Nazi followers to the most arduous rock fans ever. It’s cheeky and bold and more than a little discomfiting. Another moment discussing the naval battle between the Bismarck and the British vessel Hood has the historians lay out the stages of the battle using the board game Battleship as a visual aid—another cheeky, if bordering on silly, visual interpretation.

But nothing in these moments seems like a James Cameron movie. True, Cameron co-directed Expedition: Bismarck with Gary Johnstone, a veteran television director known for Discovery Channel and History Channel documentaries about Stephen Hawking and World War II and Jesus. It’s tempting to segment the film and attribute parts to Johnstone and parts to Cameron, but the truth is that it’s not clear which moments were directed by which men. Rebecca Keegan’s biography of Cameron, The Futurist, spends a little under two pages on the project, mostly dismissing it as a “Discovery Channel special” whose main interest lies in Cameron’s forwarding of marine forensics during the production dives. She never mentions Johnstone, which is perhaps unfair. Thus, we have to approach the film as a collaboration, although one led more by Cameron’s involvement than Johnstone’s; the participation of the more famous and powerful director justified the film’s existence, so we have to assume Cameron had more control than Johnstone.

Unlike Keegan’s characterization, however, the film is also more than a footnote. It may display a conventional approach to television documentary storytelling, but that story is touching and instructive about our violent past. And as a Cameron work, the film demonstrates Cameron attaching his obsessions to a key moment in the relatively recent past, much like he did with Titanic. Like his 1997 romantic epic, Expedition: Bismarck uses history to demonstrate that humanity’s technological prowess is forever paired with its capacity for destruction. It also shows that Cameron’s obsessions with technological armageddon are not limited to science-fiction tales he himself wrote.

Comparing Expedition: Bismarck to Titanic is also instructive as the two films’ production circumstances are intimately linked. Expedition: Bismarck was largely meant as a companion piece to Cameron’s Titanic follow-up Ghosts of the Abyss. It filmed seven months after Ghosts of the Abyss with largely the same crew and the same undersea technology. Cameron used the same research vessel in Expedition: Bismarck as he did to explore the wreck of Titanic for his 1997 epic as well as Ghosts of the Abyss, the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh. The Russian vessel was the world’s largest diving vessel at the time and was equipped with two submersibles, Mir 1 and Mir 2. Later, Cameron would go on to use the Keldysh for Aliens of the Deep as well. His brother, Michael Cameron, even designed the twin undersea remote operated vehicles (ROV) aboard the Keldysh named “Jake” and “Elwood.” 

Furthermore, Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the wreck of the Bismarck in 1989 just as he did the wreck of Titanic in 1985. The very mystique of the Bismarck is compared to that of Titanic, within the film’s very narration and within the larger public consciousness. They are unsinkable ships brought low by technological hubris, and historical emblems of Cameron’s beliefs about the dangers of technology.

Cameron leans into these connections for marketing purposes; the film was made within five years of the release of Titanic and comparing this project to that juggernaut was an obvious marketing strategy. But the film’s self-portrait of Cameron goes further than commercial instinct. It reveals key aspects about Cameron’s approach as a storyteller and a scientist, and how those two parts of himself combine in his undersea filmmaking.

Much of the film is dedicated to uncovering the true reason behind the Bismarck’s sinking, giving the film a bit of a mystery to solve. British historians have long supported the idea that the British fleet sunk the Bismarck, with a fatal blow from the Prince of Wales spelling doom for the Bismarck as it destroyed its rudder and made it unable to outrun the British warships that eventually blew apart its hull and sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic. But German survivors told a different story: they say the ship was deliberately scuttled by the crew when it was determined that it could not outrun the British fleet. Instead of prolonging the inevitable, they dynamited the hull and doomed it, and the almost 2,000 men aboard, to the abyss.

Cameron approaches the dive and the documentary as a challenge, first and foremost, one that stimulates his technological abilities as well as his storytelling ones. Adding to the challenge is the fact that the Bismarck is a war memorial, and, thus, the wreck cannot be disturbed and nothing can be removed. As Cameron admits in the film, he loves the challenge: “Personal challenge of going into this hostile environment, doing things right, doing things safely, and coming back with results. I find it very exciting.” The safety part is key, as Cameron knows all too well from his work on Titanic how hubris can sink a technological venture.

Thus, the project becomes a kind of forensic intelligence operation, a break-in to a haunted behemoth on the bottom of the ocean. Cameron and his team need to enter the wreck to determine what sank the ship, whether it was British attack or German self-destruction, and they have fixed parameters they have to operate within: enormous undersea pressure, no light, and no ability to disturb the wreck. “The ocean’s not a trivial force to mess with,” Cameron reminds us, so even apart from the memorial designation, the ocean itself is enough to contend with.

As well, the images have to tell the whole story, like the filmmakers are spies in enemy territory. They will have nothing but video footage as evidence to support one conclusion or the other, and they have to gain access to difficult areas to capture their visual evidence. Thus, the filmmaking itself becomes a part of the scientific and historicist endeavour. Again, Cameron weds the two sides of himself. The documentary becomes a testament to his twin interests and obsessions—filmmaking and scientific exploration—and how both feed each other instead of competing for his attention. Eventually, Cameron and his team investigate the hull with the rovers and see that, despite the 2,876 shells the British shot at Bismarck, the inner hull was never punctured. Thus, the German survivors were right: the Germans sank their own ship.

With its exploration of a German seafaring war machine, the film warns about the dangers of technological warfare, but as Cameron does in all his films, it also shows the creative possibilities of technology. The technology of the dive and the film reveal the answer to the mystery of the Bismarck’s sinking. They also transform the wreck from a demonic spectre of war to a memorial to the men who died and a reminder of the peace that would eventually follow its sinking. The film is careful to show the healing that followed the war and the process of the German soldiers finding peace, even friendship, with their former enemies. The technology of modern filmmaking and deep-sea exploration allows Cameron and Johnstone and their team to pay tribute and create a positive out of a negative, much as the rusticles that grow on the turrets and beams of the ship transform the rust of the steel into sustaining food for bacteria—making life from death.

Expedition: Bismarck also spends time showing the ways that you cannot remove humans from the function of technology for technology to serve its purpose for humanity. You learn this in the stories about the Bismarck and the British fleet that attacked it, how the ships were technological marvels, but not automated; it took dedicated and courageous men to operate them. We also learn about swordfish planes, old bi-planes armed with a single torpedo that the British operated in WWII. Pilots had to fly dangerously close to battleships to drop their torpedoes, facing almost certain death from anti-aircraft guns in the process.

But more positively, the innovations of the present require human ingenuity not just to design, but also to operate. A lot of time is spent on the marvels that are the Mir submersibles and the two ROVs, which Cameron’s brother designed, but each sub and rover requires a skilled pilot at the helm, as well as a team of experts to service and repair. They even need a human to get in and out of the water, the so-called “Mir cowboys” riding the subs in the choppy waters, withstanding blow after blow from the waves in order to detach and reattach the crane arm to haul the subs in and out. Technology has the capacity to destroy us and it has the capacity to heal us, if we use it well. This film embodies both elements in a truly Cameronesque way.

Perhaps most importantly, Expedition: Bismarck also becomes an act of grace towards former enemies. The film spends a lot of time interviewing survivors from the Bismarck and examining their indoctrination into Nazi ideology and their learning about the value of peace and international friendship in the war’s aftermath. As German veteran Walter Weintz puts it early in the film, when he was a German rallying under the Nazi flag, “We were convinced this is the right thing to do. Now, well, everyone knows better.” The film ends with footage of a memorial service attended by both German survivors of the Bismarck and veterans of the British fleet that attacked it. Former enemies come together to lay wreaths to fallen comrades, recount stories of their shared tragic history, and reflect on the lessons learned from the war. They all repeatedly discuss the value of peace and bemoan the madness of war that stole their youths and the lives of so many of their comrades.

By choosing to end with this message, Expedition: Bismarck becomes a memorial to the men and the lessons that may have died with them if not for the technological ability to record their stories and share their experiences. The film is a document of the dangers of technology, but it also becomes a testament to technology’s ability to explore, uncover, document, and, thus, heal. It may be more modest in terms of scale and less engrossing than the likes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day or Titanic, but like those films, it is uniquely obsessed with the duality of technological achievement. Like most James Cameron films, it uses the very act of filmmaking to turn away from fatalism and embrace the possibility of growth and everlasting peace.

7 out of 10

Expedition: Bismarck (USA, 2002)

Directed by James Cameron and Gary Johnstone; narrated by Lance Henriksen.

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