Pompeii

Dustin: 2 of 5 stars Nick: 2 of 5 stars Average: 2 of 5 stars (Canary on life support)

Dustin: Pompeii is a disaster/action flick that’s half Gladiator, half Titanic and half Dante’s Peak. It stars Kit Harington, Emily Browning and one actor you’ve heard about.

Dustin: What did you think of Pompeii, Nick?

Nick: The CGI was well done, and the cinematography wasn’t half bad.

Dustin: The special effects were pretty cool, I have to admit. The big arena battle scene was fun and really well done. But that’s really about the only good thing I can say about this movie.

Nick: While the movie needed more going on than the volcano, it did not need a villain to make it a revenge story. That idea seemed pretty insignificant for what was about to happen.

Dustin: Agreed! It seems like the writers thought a volcano erupting and killing everyone in two towns wasn’t dramatic enough, so they added a bunch of “plot” and some half-hearted subplots, and it was all pretty bad. For example, Cassia (Browning’s) father is the mayor of Pompeii and he makes some kind of business deal with the bad guy (Kiefer Sutherland). They were like, “Let’s make a deal,” cut to another location for 30 seconds, then come back, “Deal’s done!” Then, during the epic battle, they felt the need to cut away from the fighting to have the mayor and Sutherland talk about their deal a little bit more. No one cares at this point! That was filler until we get up to the volcano ‘sploding.

Nick: The script tried to hard to connect everything. The movie would have been better if the Celt (Harington) only cared about living and his revenge, but he also had to fall inexplicably in love with Cassia because he is attracted to her. Their whole love story felt forced. The idea of the “princess” falling in love with the slave is a cliche I’m growing ever more tired of.

Dustin: The dialogue in this movie was so bad it was good. I think I heard you laugh dismissively at almost every line.

Nick: It was more that there wasn’t much dialogue at all for the main character, which is a sign that the film is not that good. Though whenever he did talk it was with Atticus and it was about how Atticus will die in the arena and he won’t or some contrived attempt to force love between Celt (by the way, no one knows his real name) and Cassia. Kiefer Sutherland and Jared Harris had good lines, but there was some real conflict going on between the two of them.

Dustin: I thought the friendship between the Celt and Atticus was somewhat well executed. I found I cared about their friendship more than anything else in the film, even though it was a bit cliche and you knew where they were going with it from the get-go.

Kiefer Sutherland looked embarrassed throughout the film. I feel like there was a subtext to his performance. One that said, “Can you give me my paycheck so I can go home already?”

Nick: Atticus was my favorite character and he should have been the main focal point. The character of the Celt was annoying. He doesn’t speak much, won’t tell anyone his name, is a horse whisperer, kicks everyone’s ass, steals the heart of the “princess” when he broke the neck of her horse, and through all this there is absolutely no character growth. Or one could really just say there is no character.

Dustin: Yeah, he is pretty static. They showed him being kind to an animal because that’s the easiest way to show a character is good in a movie. It also shows that in the hedonistic Roman empire, these two characters, the Celt and the Princess, are more enlightened.

Nick: Exactly, but it’s convoluted to make the Celt so enlightened when all we know about him is that he has been a slave since his youth and yet his morality is still in place in order for the “princess” to fall in love with him.

Dustin: I guess I just had a problem with the whole concept of this film. I remember my caregiver in preschool telling me about the city of Pompeii, and I was fascinated enough by it that I actually sought out a book about it at my local library. The images of the people in their dying moments always haunted me. This is ancient history, but they still are frozen in agony. You think these are real people whose names are long forgotten, but once had hopes and dreams and people who loved them. This movie could have been a character drama about some of these folk and how they act in their final moments. Instead, it was a dumb action pic where the volcano erupting is just treated like a ticking-clock element. The Roman Empire and Pompeii are depicted like Sodom and Gomorrah and deserving to be wiped out.

Nick: My favorite part is when the volcano does erupt, but all the debris, fire, water and earthquakes miss all of the main characters in order for them to have their heroic moments. When Cassia is taken to a villa right next to the volcano while the Celt is battling in the arena miles away, the arena crumbles while the villa is up and standing for the Celt to ride there and save her.  Another good part is when Atticus is saving a family while running from a flood, he passes an entryway and the flood is held behind that area, so they all just stop and look behind them for awhile as if it was going to hold forever.

Dustin: I have a feeling the makers of this movie didn’t know what actually happens when you are struck by a volcano. At the end, SPOILER, the lovers are finally overtaken by the lava and it shows them frozen in place as they were. The city of Pompeii was buried in ash. Most of the people died instantly from the heat of the volcanic pyroclastic surge. The bodies you see today were excavated by archaeologists. The ending had people laughing in the theater, which is not what I think the filmmakers’ intentions were.

Nick: The whole movie had the audience laughing!

Dustin: It was the comedy event of the year.

I will praise the film’s set design. From artists’ renditions I’ve seen of Pompeii, they at least got the exteriors right, or did some basic research. Otherwise, this was a dumb movie that had me rooting for the volcano.