At the start of the year I selected twenty films to watch in 2014 (see here). I now wish I'd picked this list more carefully. There's some real duds, including Pompeii. What was I thinking? I duly went to watch it last week, but with very little enthusiasm. However, I was pleasantly surprised, as my minuscule expectations were slightly surpassed.
The film starts in a pleasingly olde worlde way with lots of ancient fonts and a quote from Pliny the Younger, who wrote about the volcano's eruption in 79 AD (Spoiler Alert). The evil Romans are wiping out some doughty but ill equipped Celts. The chief Roman is a splendidly dressed Kiefer Sutherland, who relishes the chance to ham it up. He talks in an English accent, keeps referring to the Majesty of Rome and raising an eyebrow, and wears increasingly splendid gold tunics. The doughty Celts are all wiped out apart from a big-eyed child, who survives by acting limply so they assume he's dead. This child grows up to be Kit Harrington, better known as John Snow from Game of Thrones. I could have said that he also spends the rest of the film acting limply, which would be a good joke but not quite fair. He's OK. His acting style is to steadfastly ignore everything and carry on with his business in a stern way, which for a stoic hero works quite well.
Once Kit has grown up he becomes a gladiator and gets transported to Pompeii, with echoes of Conan the Barbarian but obviously falling well short of that. On the way to Pompeii he passes a foxy Roman princess whose horse gets injured. Because he's from a horse tribe Kit is able to gently comfort the horse and then manfully break it's neck. The princess is naturally overwhelmed by both his sensitivity and power.
Needless to say, their love does not run smooth, as Kiefer also fancies her, and he's got the Majesty of Rome behind him. Alongside the blossoming romance Kit is also getting ready to fight another gladiator. They are both so manly though they quickly becomes pals and are soon calling each other brother and killing lots of Romans together. This is all intercut with shots of Mount Vesuvius, which you see every ten minutes rumbling in the background. There's no missing it. Only the greasy slave dealer Graecus senses the danger of the volcano, and there's a fun scene of accidental comedy where he is in a hurry to leave town but insists on being carried in a litter, which goes at barely walking pace while he shouts to go faster.
When the eruption finally happens there's a succession of dangers to avoid. First it's shaky ground, then crumbling buildings, flying fireballs, tsunami and finally a wave of ash. There's some scenes towards the end where they are running away from destruction that are entirely CGI and you might as well be watching an animation. At least most of it is quite exciting. The key for a film like this is the pacing, you've got to have the right amount of build up pre-disaster then keep the excitement up while the disaster is happening, and I think Pompeii acheives this.
The very end of the film is stylishly done, and only a horse survives (presumably he then wrote it all down so the film could be made). Overall, I'd say it's a nicely put together action film, as you'd expect from the director of Resident Evil and AVP (Paul WS Anderson). Having said that I'm pretty sure it will be a massive flop.
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