"It would have been cheaper to have lowered the Atlantic," mourned Lord Grade, producer of this absolutely awful, bottom of the pit, worst novel adoptation ever in the history of film. Eric Hughes gets the dubious honor of taking Clive Cussler's best selling 1976 book and sucking all the life out of it for this screenplay.

"Raise the Titanic!" is not really a film to be enjoyed -- it's more of a film to stare at in awe, over how awful it is considering its budget and star power. Perfect for wasting away a Saturday afternoon.

The basic story of the book and movie is this: in 1988, America is close to perfecting a "Star Wars"-type missile defense system that will make Soviet missiles "obsolete." The trouble is, the radioactive material they need to power the system (called Byzantium) doesn't exist anywhere in the world. They discover the only sizable quantity of this material was secretly mined in Russia in 1912 and shipped home to America on -- gasp -- the Titanic! So naturally the thing to do is come up with a new power source, right? Wrong! Instead they take to the sea to find the Titanic, raise it to the surface, tow it back to New York, open the ship's vault, and retrieve the Byzantium.

Of course the Russians get wind of this and try to sabatoge the operation. In the book there's a hurricane which threatens to sink Russkies and Yanks alike, a neat double-cross, and a whole lot of other stuff that didn't make its way into this movie.

You can imagine the writers, sitting there, thinking about how to turn this action novel into a movie. Let's see. We have:

(1) 1912 miners struggling and dying to mine ore in a fierce Russian winter and ship it back to America.

(2) Russian spies who kill savage members who get in their way.

(3) A murder mystery.

(4) A double-cross intended to force a KGB agent to defect to the U.S.

(5) A missile defense system that will save the world.

(6) A violent hurricane.

(7) A beautiful woman who does a striptease to distract the Russkie terrorists holding the ship hostage so her friends can fight back.

(8) Some guys, in a tiny sub, puttering around the bottom of the ocean until they find the Titanic.

So, of course, out of all of that, "Raise the Titanic!" just gives us #8 -- guys in a sub puttering around the bottom. And around the bottom. And around the bottom. For what seems like an eternity.

Keep in mind, getting out in a tiny sub and looking for a 92 foot by 882 foot ship in the pitch black ocean bottom that measures thousands of square miles in size is NOT the best way to find something. Even with high-tech sonar and radar instruments, it took nearly a decade to find the ship. If they really looked for the Titanic like they did in this film, it would have taken them a hundred years. Although it does feel like a hundred years when you watch it.

The rest of the story (what's left of it) is pointless. They find it, they raise it, they walk around it, and they tow it back to New York. There's a twist ending to this, which was in Cussler's novel -- however, our friendly screenwriters apparently felt they could outdo Cussler and added another twist, which makes no sense and ruins what good is left in the movie.

In fact, that scene, which comes at the very end of the film, has to be seen to be believed. I can't imagine what on earth the screenwriters were thinking when they added it in. It comes out of nowhere, without any foreshadowing, and goes nowhere. It's one of the worst endings in film history.

This film cost over $40 million to make and featured some really top-notch stars, who do nothing to help the effort. Jason Robards, Richard Jordan (especially miscast as the "action hero" Dirk Pitt -- a paper bag would have been as interesting in the role), Anne Archer (the striptease woman, here doing little more than bit work), David Selby (in a role designed to be a main character in the novel; here, wasted), and Sir Alec Guinness himself, collecting a paycheck as a survivor of the Titanic who tells the gang about the secret in Titanic's vault.

The film does have some nice underwater effects and some of the scenes from raising the boat were good for the time. However, there are also parts that look terrible (I laughed at the shot of the Titanic entering New York Harbor -- it's a shot of the 1976 Bicentennial Celebration, the one with the fleet of tall ships, with a photo of the Titanic superimposed over it).

The whole structure of the book depended on the theory that Titanic, having sunk in deep water, came to rest in an area of the ocean too deep to support life. Wrecks from the War of 1812 have been found in the freezing waters of Lake Champlain, and people thought that Titanic would fare similarly in the North Atlantic.

Unfortunately, the ship broke in half as it sank, landed violently on the sea floor, and rests in an area swept by currents that allowed oxygen and sea critters to cause a lot of deterioration.

So it's really too bad that it was found at all. If we thought that the ship could be raised, perhaps someone could take another stab at this project. It could have been a Bond-esque thriller with some cool action scenes and a fairly solid plot. Instead, as finished, it came out as a pokey adventure film with no point.