Pompeii

My parents have always been big movie fans, often seeing everything that comes to the theatre regardless if
it's good or bad. Whenever I go visit them, I eagerly anticipate watching a movie in one of their many recliners, embraced by the heavy blanket embroidered with majestic golden retrievers. The air conditioning typically runs high, so the blanket is needed, and the end result is a cozy movie watching experience that only mom could provide.

On a recent visit, my father was listing off the movies that we could watch. I'd seen many of them, but voted for Pompeii. My perception of the movie made it seem like a good match, and it didn't matter that everybody said the movie was terrible. If anything, that works for the movie in these situations. I often can't take my mom's word for the quality of a film, as she tends to enjoy it all - unless it's overly violent, vulgar or offensive. Pompeii is a PG-13 rated film that has been scientifically melded together to be as inoffensive as possible: you won't find much blood here (although there is violence), a lack of skin, no sign of band language, and simple leading characters with names you don't need to remember.

The story is familiar for anybody who has watched movies in the past, and the Pompeii name is going to be familiar to many who learned about the disaster in school. To catch everyone up though on the story, Pompeii was an ancient city that was devastated by the eruption of the nearby Mount Vesuvius in the year 79AD. Instant death occured for most of the inhabitants, estimated at around twenty thousand. The city was then covered in many metres of ash, where it would remain for another thousand years before the city (and a neighboring town) were rediscovered, so to speak. What you see in many images of are the result of injecting plaster into the digs, which exposed "perfectly" preserved people and animals, in various living and dying states. The images are both fascinating and unsettling; a reminder of how fragile life is and how humanity seems to love living on the edge. Indeed, there are over 3 million people living close to Vesuvius now.

So how do you fit that into a full length feature film? Well, you first watch Gladiator a few times to figure out what worked for it, then remove those elements. Halfway through your film, have the volcano explode and we can proceed to run frantically around, and hope that our hero gets away with his girl, and the villain is taken out with a gigantic, burning rock. Use Pompeii for the backdrop, because people will actually recognize the name. It's a recipe for success, right? With a budget reportedly hanging around $100 million, the film would gross just $23 million ($98 mil internationally) to become classified as a gigantic flop. And unfortunately it's not even the type of movie that will live well afterward, perhaps picking up a cult following of sorts. No, this is an example of a movie that will be forgotten, only coming up as a footnote in articles describing the history of the ancient town.

Is the movie all that bad? It is - and it's not. For a formulaic, inoffensive romp of special effects, it could have done much worse. It's just that the story has been done before, and this brings nothing new to the table. Gladiator was released in 2000, was a brilliant film and still in the minds of movie-goers, so a film like this may seem like a bit of a cheaper, weaker rip off. What stands out then are the elements missing from Pompeii that really made Gladiator shine, which is nearly everything: real emotion, motivation, context, acting, pacing, etc. The list goes on. Pompeii is empty and harmless. But it may not be fair to compare this to Gladiator in the end: Pompeii could have done much worse. Kit Harrington and Emily Browning were decent enough, and it's always nice to see Jared Harris on screen. I haven't seen Carrie-Ann Moss in anything in what seems like ages. Keither Sutherland though, damn. If anybody could be accused of phoning in a performance, this is definitely it. I'm thinking the movie would have been better off without his character at all, and instead spend more time on building the chemistry between our main love interests and our hero's rise from orphan to slave, from slave to gladiator, and from gladiator to free man. The shining star in this film has to be Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who plays another gladiator who must do battle one more time before earning his own freedom. You may recognize him as Eko from LOST, or from other films like Thor, and The Mummy Returns. Let's get a Pompeii prequel that focuses entirely on Atticus' story. Now that, could be great.