‘More of a disaster than the event it was based on’ was how Kit Harington described Pompeii the film he starred in six years ago. In these barrel-scraping times of home entertainment, I decided to open my mind, ignore the 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and take my chances.
And was it worth one hour and forty-four minutes of my precious ‘quarantime’?
I certainly think I can salvage some thoughtful observations from the experience.
1. A poor man’s Gladiator?
Any Roman action flick produced post-2000 and Ridley Scott’s epic will probably suffer by comparison. It really is peerless.
Pompeii sails even closer to those winds by borrowing so blatantly. The hero is Milo (‘they call him the Celt’) who is plucked from a provincial gladiator ring and shipped to Pompeii where he’ll fetch a better ticket price. He’s a formidable fighter, but – like Russell Crowe’s Maximus – goes about his killing reluctantly: he’s a nice guy in nasty circs.
Milo is on a course of revenge à la Maximus. His family were butchered in the opening scene by our villain, the smug Senator Quintus Attius Corvus, played by Kiefer Sutherland. Corvus re-surfaces conveniently in Pompeii, soon after Milo’s transfer. Like Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus, the Senator has a penchant for elaborate ceremonial breastplates, despite being a professional courtier staying in a fashionable sea resort for business reasons. Corvus’ villainy extends to his Pompeian host family, whose daughter Cassia catches his eye. Needless to say, Cassia’s eye has already been caught by a free-spirited, glowering gladiator…
Gladiator isn’t the only turn-of-the-century classic raided by Pompeii. The love triangle between Cassia, Corvus and Milo reminds me of the messy dynamic between DiCaprio, Winslet and Zane in Titanic. The coercive rich male becomes increasingly vicious as the lovable poor male charms the rebellious beauty. The chaos of the harbour scene, which sees the plebs elbowed out of the rescue boats, carries another hint of Titanic.
What is the appeal of Milo to Cassia? Other than a spot of horse-whispering in the first quarter, and slaying skills aside, it’s quite hard to see. He certainly can’t hold a candle to Jack in Titanic. Harington spends most of the film vying with Vesuvius for the perfect smoulder shot. Essentially, he’s back in role as Jon Snow from Game of Thrones: another repressed outsider required to scrap for survival.
The script doesn’t give him much to work with, granted. And it makes you wonder whether the reason Gladiator is so long (67 mins longer) is because you simply need that time to fill out the backstory and overwrite our assumption that a Hollywood gladiator will be just another sword-slinging beefcake.
2. Taking liberties in the name of liberty
The main production company, Impact Pictures, is Canadian and their three films since Pompeii are Resident Evil: Retribution, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and Monster Hunter. Perhaps I’d be unfair, therefore, to call them out on the historical accuracy. Their historical consultant was Professor Jonathan Edmondson, a Roman historian at York. How much sway he had, who knows, but here’s what jarred for me:
- The film opens with Romans wiping out a village in ‘Northern Britannia’ as part of the ‘Rebellion of the Celtic Horse Tribes’. Was this the rebellion of the Brigantes led by Venutius 69? Are they recorded as especially horsey?
- Cassia is beautiful and well-born but unmarried in her early 20’s. What’s more, she’s clearly holding out for an authentic love match and her family seem happy to hold out with her.
- Senator Corvus derides Pompeii as a lifeless backwater, even claiming ‘Dalliances in the countryside hold little interest to the emperor.’ Claudius had a villa overlooking Puteoli (Pozzuoli) whose remains you can (so they claim) glimpse today on boat trips from Baia; the Villa Poppaea in Naples is believed to have been Nero’s.
- After his first victory in the arena of Pompeii, Milo shatters a Roman standard over his knee: impressive. Corvus retaliates by sending into the arena his second-in-command, presumably an aristocrat, to fight Milo one-on-one. High risk and just a little unlikely, no?
None of this makes the film hard to watch, let’s be honest. But a couple of things did bug me more:
- The social conscience of Cassia. She comes across as alarmingly naive about the realities of Roman imperialism, and she is incredibly trusting of a gladiator slave after knowing him five minutes. The two of them, along with Milo’s slave mate Atticus, are out for freedom above all. Their ideals seemed to square suspiciously with the sort of American audience which so constantly extols its liberty.
- The gods are perceived by the main characters as benign and solicitous. As fireballs rain down, Cassia asks ‘Is this the end of the world? Why would the gods let this happen?’ Milo, likewise, threatens Corvus with retribution at the hands of his own native gods – as if they’re equally miffed about Roman imperialism. Perhaps they are, but for me this is another Americanism, whereby faith in a higher reckoning is one’s ultimate recourse.
(The film made $18m gross profit, mainly from the US market, so who am I to knock the producers?)
What did I like?
I enjoyed the opening titles, which quote Pliny the Younger over some Zimmer-esque strings and ghostly shots of the actual Pompeian body casts.
The visual effects team also do a great job on the set-piece obliteration of Pompeii. There’s an imaginative moment when a tidal wave surges into the harbour and propels a rigged galley down the high street like a bullet out the barrel of a gun.
Would I recommend it?
I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve reviewed its low-budget competitor, Apocalypse Pompeii, also released in 2014. Here’s a still to whet your appetite:
