Pompeii
starring Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Browning, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica Lucas, Currie Graham, Sasha Roiz, Jared Harris and Kiefer Sutherland
written by Janet Scott Batchler, Lee batchler and Michael Robert Johnson
directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
Pompeii features the impossible love story of a British slave and a Pompeiian noblewoman against the backdrop of the famous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in August, A.D. 79.
There is absolutely no mention made of the port city of Herculaneum which is a stupid historical mistake. I thought it was an exciting movie to watch but not a very intelligent one.
I kept thinking it was a 3D British made-for-TV movie, with a lot of no-name actors. It looked too poor for a commercially distributed film, but too good for a made-for-TV film, so it was hard to tell. It turns out, though, that it’s a German-Canadian movie, not an English one at all. Then why did so many of the actors have British accents, and why was Kiefer Sutherland, playing an awful Roman senator lusting after a local rich girl, speaking with a horrible and poorly done faux accent?
There are way too many names, hyphenated names, and writers in this movie, that’s for sure. But marvelous depictions of destruction and panic: pyroclastic clouds; tsunami; gas. All the good stuff I learned about in high school geography class with Mr. Smith.