Pompeii (2014)

Originally Published in The Daily Nebraskan, 2/25/2014

The quote that opens “Pompeii” is genuinely chilling. It mentions “the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants and the shouting of men” in the ash cloud that engulfed the city. Pliny the Elder, historical author of these quotes and Pompeii survivor, tells us the people caught in the cloud “imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”

Unfortunately, this quote is the most interesting part of the film. Between it and the climax of the film, the audience is given a story that amounts to a rehash of “Gladiator.” It’s watchable, but if you’ve already seen “Gladiator” and know what happens in Pompeii, why bother?

In 62 A.D., a tribe of Celts in Britannia is slaughtered by the Roman guard, commanded by Senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland). A boy survives and after watching his family murdered, is enslaved by the Romans. Seventeen years later, the boy grows into a skilled fighter, catching the eye of slave traders looking for gladiator material. The young man, dubbed “the Celt” (Kit Harrington) is taken to the city of Pompeii to fight as a gladiator. Along the way, he catches the eye of Cassia (Emily Browning), a Roman dignitary who does little in the film besides look pretty and be righteous.

In fact, this whole film just wants to look pretty. Director Paul W. S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” movies and “Alien Vs. Predator,” knows how to bring the spectacle. One scene shows us the entire city of Pompeii from a bird’s eye view, with thousands of citizens filling the streets as they move toward the stadium. Inside the stadium, a chorus of announcers in ornate golden masks announce the events to come; their presence is frightening and dreamlike. It would be foolish not to mention the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which makes up the entire third act of the film, but also has nothing to do with the preceding story other than the fact it will kill most of the main characters.

This is a competent historical epic heavy on tasty visuals and light on character. The characters are derivative archetypes with motivations thinner than cobwebs; we have our hero in the Celt, the damsel in Cassia, our villain in Senator Corvus and an honorable ally in Atticus. Atticus is an African slave who, with one last victory in the arena, will earn his freedom according to Roman law. Atticus’s character more than borrowed from Djimon Hounsou’s character in “Gladiator,” but that hardly matters other than as an example of how uninspired “Pompeii” is.

If you know anything about the city of Pompeii, then you know exactly how this movie ends. The climax renders all of the preceding events irrelevant. The eruption of Vesuvius has nothing to do with the struggles of these archetypal, two-dimesional characters, so why keep them archetypal? In other words, why make it a “hero’s journey”? It would have been much more interesting if the filmmakers had tried to explore class divisions in contemporary Pompeii. You can probably guess what role a volcanic eruption could play in equalizing the classes.

If the writers had tried to work in themes of the natural world, the conflict of man versus nature, class divisions, really anything that could be remotely connected to an apocalyptic disaster like Vesuvius, then maybe this film would have been more interesting. Instead, a grand natural disaster is reduced to a deus ex machina, and $100 million has been wasted on yet another 3D spectacle.

Just think about what you could do with $100 million. I’ll tell you one thing: you could buy 5,000,000 copies of movies better than “Pompeii.”