Pompeii (2014): When Disaster Meets Romance
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is not a film about the eruption of Vesuvius. It is a film about a slave-turned-gladiator and a merchant’s daughter whose love is thwarted by a corrupt Roman senator, and the eruption of Vesuvius happens to provide the third act. The volcano is plot device rather than subject. This is a reasonable choice for a commercial action film built on a historical catastrophe; it is not the choice that a serious engagement with Pompeii’s destruction would have made.
The production design is, within its genre’s conventions, competent. The city looks like a version of Pompeii that reflects genuine archaeological awareness: the street grid, the Forum, the amphitheater, the colonnaded public spaces. The social hierarchy of the city — the wealthy merchant class, the gladiatorial underclass, the Roman senatorial elite visiting from the capital — is rendered with enough differentiation to suggest research. Kit Harington’s Milo is a Celtic slave whose horsemanship serves as both his distinguishing skill and the mechanism for his connection to Emily Browning’s Cassia, and the film has the sense to make their relationship based on something — his competence, her intelligence — rather than pure proximity.
What the film cannot do, and does not try to do, is engage with the actual historical record of the eruption as Pliny the Younger documented it. The eruption sequence — which occupies most of the film’s final third — is spectacular by the standards of 2014 digital effects and entirely divorced from the documented sequence of events on August 24 and 25, 79 AD. The pyroclastic surges that killed most of the victims are present, but the timeline, the specific failure modes of the eruption, the documented pattern of death and escape that the archaeology has reconstructed — none of this constrains the film’s disaster choreography. The eruption is apocalyptic spectacle, not historical document.
The gladiatorial sequences are the film’s strongest historical content. Anderson’s career has been built on action choreography, and the arena fights are executed with genuine physical specificity: the weapons are correct, the fighting styles differentiated by type, the crowd dynamics recognizably Roman. The climactic arena sequence — in which Milo and the Nubian gladiator Atticus fight together against multiple opponents while the volcano erupts around them — is preposterous as historical narrative and effective as action cinema, which is the film’s consistent mode of operation.
Kiefer Sutherland’s villain Senator Corvus is a cartoon, which is standard for the genre and unremarkable. The film’s political content — Roman corruption, slavery’s brutality, the relationship between Pompeiian provincial culture and Roman metropolitan power — is present as background texture rather than dramatic substance. The disaster film’s structural requirements — clear villains, clear heroes, countdown to catastrophe — do not accommodate political complexity.
Pompeii is a film that Pompeiians themselves would find entirely unrecognizable as a representation of their city or their deaths, but that a modern audience can use as an entry point to the actual history. Its visual vocabulary — the street life, the architecture, the social arrangements — is sufficiently derived from the archaeological record to provide a foundation on which actual knowledge can be built. This is probably the most useful thing commercial historical cinema can aspire to: not accuracy, which it cannot achieve within its genre’s constraints, but evocation plausible enough to send curious viewers to better sources.