That there is history to reimagine is where filmmakers piss. James Cameron had the night of 14th and morning of 15th in April 1912 urine-stained down to the last second the tip of RMS Titanic’s stern slipped into the sea. But he needed several research years, a dollar amount that could build a cruise ship in its time, beyond a motley crew of talents, and 194 minutes to own that much–“A love story on an epic scale with spectacular effects,” in cinematographer Russell Carpenter’s words.
So no, we did not expect Paul WS Anderson post-Death Race to be territorial in historical tragedy. But one could not disregard a prologue by way of an eyewitness account, and quoting Pliny the Young was how this film should have started anyway. That, plus a tribe massacre, promising cinematography, and the thrill of seeing Kit Harington outside the cold, ominous walls of Westeros.
It’s a story called Pompeii.
It’s based on a textbook tale we had heard more than once, about a city buried in up to 20 feet of ash and pumice that came out of the mouth of the mythological Vesuvius. The film was dishing out a cautionary tale as it attempted to walk the line between vengeance and mercy, hope and fear, love and war. It started off strong with a show of killings, slavery, and social politics at work in the time of Pax Romana. Harington’s Milo was a Celtic horseman orphan-turned-slave-turned-gladiator. Last of his tribe, Milo was the Cesar Millan of horses and had that beastly strength, which were his ticket to Pompeii. To pit him in the same arena against Kiefer Sutherland’s Corvus over the daughter of Pompeii’s governor was the way things go bland. Here’s the man who had ordered the death of your parents, now a Roman Senator and not a stray of grey hair older, pursuing the woman you fall in love with, ending up in the same city where you were being slated to staged carnage, and you got that stroke of luck to kill his men and break the symbolic Roman lance in his face. Vengeance was served. But no case was built to make us hate the Romans, at least for this show. The other virtues merely sidings making all there was a chore to swallow.
What Anderson forgot to stuff into his 105 minutes was glory. The mighty Vesuvius rumbling in the backdrop was oblivious to the life swirling at its foot, but the movie shouldn’t have been. The sweeping eagle eye on his title city could have inspired curiosity: the collective mood of the people; traditions seeping out through language, habits, and emotions; the glory before the irredeemable fall. We found nothing in Pompeii to root for. Not even the dialogues, which could be a film’s saving grace. Character lines were worked out in morsels. At least they gave the better lines–if not the longer, more coherent ones–to Emily Browning’s Cassia: “Senator, you have mistaken me for the kind of woman who drapes herself across your lap in Rome.” We knew who was gonna get the girl. The love angle left us as dry and wanting as were the kissing plaster statues of Milo and Cassia at the final shot. Perhaps we should watch this movie again drunk. Still the trick is to not expect anything.
But if filmmakers wanted to leave the imagining of a love story on an epic scale with spectacular effects to us, we would have picked a book instead.
We recommend Jeffrey Eugenides’ reimagination of the Great Fire of Smyrna in his book Middlesex. More or less the book-chapter equivalent of the sinking of Titanic.
Toned-down & vintage 