Trailer Trashin’: Mount Vesuvius Goes Boom in Pompeii

It’s the last week of August, and that means the end of the summer movie season is finally here. But as any educated consumer of film can tell you, movies that emphasize spectacle over substance are in no way limited to the summer months. And this week’s Trailer Trashin’ is a great example of this, with our first look at this coming February’s historical action-adventure Pompeii.

Premise: Set in the days leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii, a slave on a ship heading for Naples works to get home to save the woman he loves and his best friend, a gladiator trapped inside the city’s coliseum.

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My take: There are certain events from history that just lend themselves to being depicted on the movie screen. One such event is the destruction of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii following the eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pompeii has been used as the setting of no less than nine films, many of them based on or inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii. Now, the famous disaster is being brought to the screen again in a new film by director/writer/producer Paul W.S. Anderson. This is the first teaser trailer for Pompeii, and to be honest, it doesn’t look very good.

If nothing else, the cast is an interesting and talented bunch. Most prominent in this teaser is our hero, the slave Milo – boy, that’s the kind of name you think of for a badass action hero – played by Kit Harrington, best known as Jon Snow on the HBO series Game of Thrones. Harrington is certainly a talented actor, but nothing I’ve seen so far of Pompeii makes me think it’ll give him anything meaty to work with. Also seen here is Emily Browning as Cassia, Milo’s love interest, but we don’t know much about the character or what part she’s going to play. We catch a brief glimpse of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Bridgageous in a pretty cool shot of him kneeling amidst the ruins of a market street. I believe the voice we hear narrating at the beginning is Jared Harris, who plays a character named Lucretius. Not seen in this teaser are Kiefer Sutherland as the yet-unnamed villain, Jessica Lucas as Ariadne, Carrie-Anne Moss as Cassia’s mother, and Paz Vega as Flavia.

I’ve had an interesting relationship with the work of director Paul W.S. Anderson. On the one hand, he directed Mortal Kombat (1995), which I still consider the only good movie based on a video game that we’ve had so far. He also did Alien vs. Predator (2004), which wasn’t a good movie, but I did enjoy seeing it. But on the other hand, he also kicked off the Resident Evil film series, which I’ve fortunately been able to move past hating and now just regard with indifference. Ultimately, I think he’s an interesting director, if not an especially talented one, and I do try to follow the projects he’s working on. And if nothing else, I think his films have pretty much all featured great production design and good action, so I can’t take that away from him.

I admit that some of the imagery here does look kind of cool. I do love period action films, and I think that ancient Rome is an underused setting for films being made nowadays. The glimpses we see of the actual eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of the city do look appropriately epic, although the CGI is still in a pretty rough state. But at the same time, there’s really nothing on display here that we haven’t already seen done better in other movies.

In the end, this is a mixed bag leaning toward the negative. The cast is great and the visuals are pretty cool, but there just doesn’t appear to be enough substance to amount to much of anything. The story of Pompeii and Vesuvius is an amazing one, and I’d love it if we were getting an awesome film based on it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Unless it ends up getting good reviews, I’ll probably be giving Pompeii a miss when it comes out in February.