“You can be blasé about some things, Rose,” Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) pretentiously sniffs in this famous movie you may have heard about. “But not about Titanic!'”

And so it with the movie about that famous ship. Love it or hate it, there’s little to be blase about regarding the biggest screen hit of all time.

Fifteen years later, and the film isn’t any shorter. The dialogue is still peppered groaners like Mr. Zane’s “blase” line.

But “Titanic,” back on the big screen 100 years after the famous ocean liner went down, and back in 3D, wears its blockbuster weight with ease. And thanks to the 3D conversion — which may be a tad darker than when first released — it is aging surprisingly well, a meticulous recreation of a great ship and a great tragedy built around a good, old-fashioned popcorn picture.

Writer-director James Cameron’s conceit, framing this within the memories of an aged survivor (Gloria Stuart) and the search of  a modern deep sea explorer (Bill Paxton) for a famous diamond, “The Heart of the Ocean” that survivor once wore, still slows the movie’s opening scenes to a crawl. But it still works.

Cameron told a story of “the One Percent” and “the 99 percent” before we were calling them that, a tale of class, love that crosses class boundaries, of the rich who plan to keep the rest of us in our place, of the nouveau riche who remember where they came from and won’t stand for it.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the roving, Jack Londonish your steerage passenger Jack Dawson. Kate Winslet is Rose, the child of privilege who needs to marry a rich creep (Zane’s Cal Hockley) to preserve her family’s standing.

Fifteen years later, we can appreciate DiCaprio’s callow, annoying and showy turn for what it is — boyishness. Winslet now has an Oscar as final confirmation of what has been obvious from the start, that she’s one of the great actresses. Cameron peppers the cast with winners — sassy Kathy Bates as “The Unsinkable” Molly Brown, David Warner as a murderous valet, Victor Garber as the shaken, guilt-ridden ship designer Thomas Andrews, Bernard Hill, a Captain Edward Smith who slips into shock at what is transpiring.

Cameron’s glimpses of Titanic lore — the gates preventing steerage passengers from reaching the deck, the elderly couple famously dressing up and waiting to drown in their cabin — seem just right.

The 3D doesn’t really impress until you get to that fateful moment when they hit the iceberg, the helmsman making the same mistake any boat owner will recognize, throwing it into reverse and turning away from the berg at the same time. The calamity of what follows really pops off the screen in 3D, the blasts of water thundering through, deck by deck, the vast ship standing upright, on her bow, as she points toward the bottom of the sea.

I found the length tedious, some of the dialogue eye-rolling and some of the digital effects (the digital ship’s digital wake seemed puny) when “Titanic” first came out. But those quibbles fade with time. Raised to 3D for its return to the big screen, “Titanic” plays the way the “King of the World” meant it to — as a history and sociology lesson wrapped

in a corny, but fun and entertaining yarn.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language

Cast: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Gloria Stuart

Credits: Written and directed by James Cameron, a Paramount Pictures release. Running time: 3:14