Jacco said:
Izanagi009 said:
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.