Escape to the Movies: Pompeii

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

"Didn't see Pompe I". That one was funny.

Yeah, Guardians of the Galaxy is looking great. But, uh, was 'Hooked On A Feeling' part of the original trailer, or did Bob add it in himself because of how pumped he is about this?

No, it's 100% legit part of the trailer, and I think it gives the trailer some serious personality.

 

[JenSeven]

Yeah....

Pompeii was already destroyed about by an earthquake 17 years before the eruption of Vesuvius. So they were probably still rebuilding parts of it. Nice work on your history movie makers.
The people in Pompeii were killed by a pyroclastic flow that issued forth from the volcano when it erupted, which hit the city well before any rocks and lava. This is a wave of superheated air. It travels at about 450 miles per hour, reaches around the 1000 degrees C and can travel over water. Seems also that there is a kind of tsunami involved here too. This is wrong. A pyroclastic flow would have caused a tsunami, but in THE OTHER DIRECTION, due to it, after a certain distance travelling over the Med burrowing under water and causing the tsunami. Nice work on your history and physics movie makers.
Also Italy used to be a few miles wider in the old days. This is due to erosion. There is a palace from the time of Nero on the bottom of the Mediterranean due to this. So Pompeii would be larger and further away from the sea. So again, nice work on your history and geography movie makers.

Since I haven't seen the movie I cannot comment on their portrayal of Roman culture, but I can make a safe bet that they got that horribly wrong as well.

However there is one thing. Most marriages were arranged. This happened when most women were still little girls. Romans married girls when they were 12 or 13. So the female in the movie here should have been MUCH younger. Marriages were arranged when the girls were usually around 8 to 10.

I bet you found Day After Tomorrow and 2012 unwatchable because of the science as well? Come on, dude, it's a movie. Not a documentary. And if you're surprised that Hollywood gets EVERYTHING in history wrong, then I feel sorry for you because they get literally EVERYTHING in history wrong. lol

No, I wouldn't find those movies unwatchable, although I haven't watched either of them. This is because those movies profile themselves as science fiction movies.
Pompeii is a historical drama, just like Titanic. With this I expect a certain degree of research, knowledge and accuracy.
James Cameron did his best to make his movie as historically accurate as possible (even though he did make a few minor errors due to over-dramatization of certain parts of the movie), Pompeii is a shambles. Fact-checkers and researchers seem to be pretty rare in Hollywood, let alone people that "know" things.

If they had done the slightest bit of research, they would have known that one of the most common finds in Pompeii were buckets of plaster. They were still replastering the houses from the earthquake 17 years earlier. They would also have known that Pompeii was a "pleasure resort". If I remember correctly, there is an entire museum in Napels dedicated to all the smut they dug up there. It's no longer open to the public, Napels seems to have limited the access to it.

Also I noticed that the Vesuvius depicted in the movie was an open volcano. This is again wrong. Like the current Vesuvius it was capped. This is what makes that volcano so dangerous. Because it is capped, it keeps all the hot volcanic gasses inside and keeps them there, building the pressure inside. When this pressure exceeds the limits of the structure of the volcano it explodes, releasing all the pressurised hot gasses at once. This is the pyroclastic flow.
Vesuvius is fundamentally different from other volcanoes like Etna and much more dangerous.

 

[Stormtyrant]

Bob, Pompeii wasn't that much of a massive brothel: most Roman towns were like that.

If you want an actual example of a seedy Las Vegasesque Roman brothel town you should check out Baiae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiae)

 

[LadyRhian]

A More historically accurate retelling of the end of Pompeii (and Herculaneum). Mind you, there were two other small towns in the shadow of Vesuvius that have never been found or uncovered.


And it's quite sad when I prefer this 1984 version of the Bulwer-Lytton novel to the modern movie:


(Can you blame me? It had Duncan Regehr in it! )

 

[Silverspetz]

THEY ARE NOT REMAKING STARGATE!!!

It was a joke!

Ugh...

*facepalm.

The Katie Perry part was a joke but the really are remaking Stargate. Or at the very least Emmerich has acquired the rights to do so. It remains to be seen whether or not it will actually happen.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

I remember back when I was a kid, I watched Lizzie McGuire, about an episode where Lizzie and her friends sneak into an R rated movie called "Vesuvius", which was a parody of Titanic meets Dante's Peak.

Now producers 'actually' made a movie like that. I'm not sure if that's funny or incredibly sad...

How much of a bottom are you scraping when you're rebooting movies that didn't even exist?

I think it safe to say they hit the bottom of the barrel LONG ago, and yet they still keep digging...

OT: The length of this review (plus with how much time is wasted on Guardians) is a silent statement on how boring and uninteresting this film is.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

So what you're saying is that it's ok we don't get badass female-led superhero films because we get an anthropomorphic animated talking animal. Something the likes of which have never been seen in cinema before.

What it's saying is that Marvel is willing to stick a parody of an anthropomorphic Disney cartoon character into an action-Sci-Fi based on a comic book that most of us probably hadn't even heard about until a year or two ago with a bold, "fuck it, let's do it!" attitude that is infectious and endearing, while DC is so apologetic and limp-wristed with its own source material that it can't even conceive of a film starring the most iconic female superhero in comic book history that the fans have been clamoring over for years.

So like the Green Lantern and Man of Steel films, you completely missed the point.

 

[Arawn]

Okay, so Pompeii seems to be a flop. I thought it would be a full on disaster movie worth a matinee, but seems they shoehorned a weak love story just because that alone wasn't enough to fill the hour plus running time. Ironically it's been compared to Titanic and like the aforementioned movie it has the same flaw: everyone knows how it ends. Sure you can predict how some movies end within reason. Superhero movie the superhero wins, crime thriller the cop wins or the bad guy gets away, etc. Pretty basic stuff, but if the last 30 something minutes is a boat sinking and everyone knows it's coming you need to step up your game. While I didn't like Titanic, I give it some respect for holding my interest. I think the final sequence would have been more interesting if Rose and Jack weren't "in love" Think about it she goes back to rescue some near stranger and in the end he gives up his life to save her from the cold waters. Now that would be dramatic.

Now to the matter of Guardians of the Galaxy; YAY. A flash of action, the bits of humor, and the exposition are all good. Should be interesting to say the least.

 

[faefrost]

I'm betting the sequel will be "Atlantis" whereby the mythical floating city of Atlantis in all it's dingy blue and orange glory, angers some god or other, amid some hackneyed cliched romance set to bad music. At which time due to bad leadership the Island hits an iceberg, causing the volcano to explode and the whole thing flips over and sinks. (Much like some members of our beloved Congress think will happen to Guam should we station another 100 or so Marines there. I serriously wish I was joking about that one. Yes they are that stupid.) Leaving behind naught but a cautionary tale for future generations and the poor broken hearted waif from the love story left floating on a giant loofa that tragically only had roon for 1.

 

[McMarbles]

Yay, a Stargate remake! Because why should Star Trek be the only classic SF franchise to get shat upon?

Ugh, is that REALLY the Green Goblin?

Hey, what's that one cartoon frame (with the giant Egyptian gods) from?

 

[McMarbles]

So what you're saying is that it's ok we don't get badass female-led superhero films because we get an anthropomorphic animated talking animal. Something the likes of which have never been seen in cinema before.

What it's saying is that Marvel is willing to stick a parody of an anthropomorphic Disney cartoon character into an action-Sci-Fi based on a comic book that most of us probably hadn't even heard about until a year or two ago with a bold, "fuck it, let's do it!" attitude that is infectious and endearing, while DC is so apologetic and limp-wristed with its own source material that it can't even conceive of a film starring the most iconic female superhero in comic book history that the fans have been clamoring over for years.

So like the Green Lantern and Man of Steel films, you completely missed the point.

You... are aware that Rocket Raccoon is directly from the comics?

 

[SnakeoilSage]

You... are aware that Rocket Raccoon is directly from the comics?

*Rubs the bridges of his nose* Walking away now. You stay here until someone comes and helps you.

 

[McMarbles]

You... are aware that Rocket Raccoon is directly from the comics?

*Rubs the bridges of his nose* Walking away now. You stay here until someone comes and helps you.

Whoops... seems I actually HAVE missed the point, sorry. I actually agree with you.

On the other hand, Marvel's TV efforts so far have been "NCIS, but with some superpower stuff." Arrow has AoS beat hands down.

 

[Keith Fraser]

I wonder if this was made as a replacement for the Roman Polanski adaptation of Robert Harris' novel Pompeii (Polanski's arrest put the kibosh on said adaptation, if I remember correctly). The plot of this version has some vague similarities (besides being set during the Pompeii eruption, obviously) in that it has a rich girl trying to avoid marrying some sleazebag and eventually going off with the hero. The novel was rather more cerebral, though; the pre-disaster plot involved government corruption and stuff and it was generally an interesting look at life in ancient Rome.

 

[DaViller]

From the trailers I expected the movie to feature a scene in wich the gladiators form an army to fight back against the vulcano, I feel disppointed and disillusioned now.

 

[Sight Unseen]

Jon Snow needs to stop finding himself in occupations that are centered close to things that can wipe out an entire civilization of humans.

He can't help it. He knows nothing.

 

[The Great JT]

I'm still kind of hopeful for the next Fantastic Four movie. I mean, Marvel Studios has the rights back (I think, I need to pay more attention), so they're at least going to TRY.

 

[Cybylt]

God, as a person who studied Latin and has been to Rome, this movie just feels horrible.

If you want to make a movie of people in Pompeii (and nearby Herculaneum since that also got wiped out),their lives and how they reacted to a volcano(no science so they probably thought Vulcan was angry), focus on the little people: the artisans, the prostitutes (kind of a poor term since the politics surrounding them gave the women a lot of control)and the families who probably used the volcano's geothermal heat for the thermae. Focus on a small personal story about ordinary people living their lives normally before the volcano and looking back on their lives. Why did you have to make a story about a girl falling for a poor boy with competition from a rich suitor; it's been done to death and can be done at any location with any type of situation. Its just a waste of a concept and location.

The idea that ancient humans didn't have any understanding of what we call science is asinine. Especially the Romans. Really, only very early humans attributed events like that to gods. Any reasonably advanced society had at least an idea about natural/supernatural. The Romans were advanced enough to know that a volcano eruption was a natural event, even if they didn't fully understand why.

People seem to have this idea that humans were 100% superstitious until about 1500. That's just not the case. They had the same cognitive and intellectual abilities as we do.

These are people that thought putting sheep balls on your face was the cure for the cold and pissing in the direction of someone was good manners. Scattered genius does not equate to a genius society. The 30's and 40's had Einstein but that sure as shit didn't mean everyone was on the verge of discovering relativity or crafting new mathematic theorem.

More on topic - As someone who knows a bit of history, this movie's lack of Pompeii's fairly famous porn graffiti and statues of Pan having sex with everything is a letdown since it just preserves the mentality of the pristine advanced culture bullcrap that pervades society today.

Further, that eruption only took 10-15% of the population of the island, tons of people saw it coming and had vacated long beforehand. So I guess "disaster" might irrelevant. So I guess at least they were smarter than presented in the movie. In some respects at least.

 

[PunkRex]

"At least those got to the damn poin-SEE YOU NEXT TIME!

I see what you did there Bob.

OT: It seems John Snerooow knows nothing of good scripts... I apologise.

I'm really starting to feel bad for these pretty, young actors having these break out roles on generally good television only to pick the worst sort of shit for their movie debuts... looking at you cast of Supernatural.

 

[ace_of_something]

The villain's name is 'Corvis?' Seriously. Pretty sure that means Crow or Raven in latin.