Pompeii

 POMPEII

Director : Paul W.S Anderson
Year : 2014
Genre : Disaster
Rating : *1/2

On paper, 'Pompeii' sounds like a movie that I should adore. For one thing I love disaster movies. Whether it be 'Deep Impact', 'The Towering Inferno' or absolute ridiculousness like 'The Day After Tomorrow' and 'Noah', I have always enjoyed watching directors take pleasure in annihilating humanity with various forces of nature and with as much destruction and death as possible. As well as disaster movies, I also love volcanoes. For as long as I can remember, these mountains of molten rock have enthralled me, fascinated me and a few years ago, I was even lucky to travel to the once grand city of Pompeii and walk around the crater of the mighty Mount Vesuvius that towers over the landscapes like an ominous, threatening colossus. So naturally, a big budget, highly energized disaster movie centered around a fabled volcano that destroyed the entire population and infrastructure of an Italian city should be my cup of tea shouldn't it?

While many movies over the course of motion picture history have tried to convey the immense power of volcanoes such as 'Dante's Peak', '2012', 'When Time Ran Out', 'Krakatoa : East Of Java' and of course, the aptly named 'Volcano', none have managed to capture the awe inspiring majesty and spectacle of just what happens when one of these monoliths of nature erupt. Always substituting potentionally astonishing visuals for generic scenes of people running away from ash and smoke and buildings falling down into piles of indecipherable rubble, we never get to see the incredible sight of molten magma bursting out of the crater of the volcano, slowly snaking down the mountains face as it nears it's final destination. However, 'Pompeii' promised to be different. With a trailer that contains all of the volcanic elements that I have always wanted to see on a cinema screen; white hot flowing lava, volcanic bombs falling out of the sky and landing on houses and trees, pyroclastic flows that act like gaseous bulldozers decimating everything in their path and of course, the eventual explosion that completely destroyed Mount Vesuvius, 'Pompeii' had me hyped from the get go and I went into the cinemas with a great deal of expectation and hope. Boy, were my hopes dashed quickly. 

For a film depicting the 'supposed' events of A.D 79 (the historical accuracy is weak to say the least), 'Pompeii' actually contains very little volcano. Instead we get a very boring story about a slave-turned -gladiator named Milo (Kit Harrington), a man who witnesses his parents killed as a child and now has to learn to fight in the arenas and coliseums of Europe. As well as learning to fight and become a feared warrior, he must also woo the woman he has fallen hopelessly in love with (Emily Browning), a woman who just happens to be betrothed to an evil Roman senator (Kiefer Sutherland). Now for anyone who has seen either 'Gladiator' or even 'Titanic', this synopsis should sound pretty familiar. In fact, the similarities to Ridley Scott's Academy Award winner are so blatant that it is almost an insult to both the makers of that fine movie as well as the intelligence of the audience. 

The director Paul W.S Anderson (whose work includes the so - so science fiction thriller 'Event Horizon' and the God - awful 'Resident Evil' series) has little to no experience with big budget special effects and this is obvious from the opening frames. Edited to the point where action scenes become indistinguishable and the eventual volcano scenes become boring, 'Pompeii' is a masterclass in how not to use CGI. With effects that range from mediocre to 'straight to DVD B movie', the film is awash with poorly generated buildings, horses that are reminiscent of 'Zoo Tycoon' and volcanic bombs that look like half chewed chewing gum balls rolled in lumpy mud. It doesn't help that the acting is beyond bad from every single member of the cast, including a way over the top Kiefer Sutherland whose extravagant and outrageous performance makes Jeremy Irons' Razzie worthy turn in  'Dungeons & Dragons' look like Laurence Olivier in his golden years. Apart from Sutherland, the performances are so bland, so generic and so without any conviction whatsoever that I couldn't wait to see every single actor engulfed in flames and suffocate under a hot blanket of ash. Unfortunately, I'd have to wait for a full hour and ten minutes to see the damn volcano throw a wobbly and even then I wasn't impressed.

It is clear throughout 'Pompeii' that Paul W.S Anderson has a thing for Mount Vesuvius. In fact, every single scene begins with a shot of the mountain and then panning down to an establishing shot of the town and every scene conversely ends with an establishing shot of the town and then panning up to the giant silhouette of the volcano, no matter where the set is set or in which direction to the volcano it is. What, are we to presume that Vesuvius encircles the city like a giant bagel or are there just dozens of little volcanoes surrounding it that nobody has noticed before? To be fair, while these moments are laughably dumb and destroy any sense of physics or geography, the director does do a good job of setting up tension and building up anticipation. Scenes of small earth tremors and the Earth cracking as if it were a egg give us a sense that the film is building up to something and this does keep our wavering attention as we wait to see what will inevitably happen.

However, all of the energy that has been driving the movie for the past sixty minutes is suddenly evaporated when the mountain erupts in all of it's not so impressive CGI glory. As mentioned earlier, the special effects are absolutely nothing special and even though these scenes of eruption and destruction only last for about 15 minutes, they get old very quickly indeed thanks to Andersons trademark repetition and a total lack of imagination on the part of the animators and the editors. It also doesn't help that while we see people burning to death and become encapsulated in smoke, the characters are so one dimensional and so ineffectual that you don't care about them one iota. Approximately 16,000 people died on that catastrophic day in AD. 79.  Thanks to Paul W.S Anderson, I couldn't have given a tinkers toot about any of them.

'Pompeii' feels like it should have been released in the 1990's; a time when big budget, badly written and badly acted disaster movies such as 'Twister', 'Independence Day' and the aforementioned 'Volcano' where a staple of multiplex cinema. However, unlike those films which have a naive, 'so bad their good' charm, 'Pompeii' just has a 'so bad it's bad' non charm. With a script that is devoid of emotion or identity, special effects that lack anything special at all, acting that would make Tommy Wiseau giggle and a narrative that is derivative of much better movies, 'Pompeii' is a total waste of time and an insult to history. 

UP YOURS POMPEII!