Director Paul W.S. Anderson is an interesting director to
say the least. He’s probably most famous
for the string of Resident Evil films
that have ostensibly been coming out consistently since 2002. And yeah, these aren’t good movies, but you
know what they are? Effects-driven eye
candy that’s an outlet for whatever fucked-up thing Anderson decides would be
neat to render in 3D next. And people
flock to it. Now, personally, I’m not a
huge fan of Anderson’s movies, but I totally understand the appeal. That just makes his latest film, Pompeii, all the stranger though. Anderson doesn’t play to his strengths until
the third act, instead telling a bloated and boring love story that delivers on
the promised destruction too late for anyone to give a damn.
The plot of this film is essentially just a retelling of Titanic.
Seriously, we need to get Avril Lavigne to release a remix, because “he
was a (poor) boy, she was a (rich) girl, couldn’t be any more obvious.” Said poor boy is a gladiator played by Game of Thrones’s Kit Harrington, and none of his acting talent is allowed to shine
here. He’s just a lot of eye candy for
the heterosexual female demographic. The film’s
dialogue even goes so far as to blatantly make a sexual object of him, making
the pandering even more transparent.
Emily Browning plays said rich girl, and while she’s serviceable at what
the script would have her do, all she does get to do is size up Harrington like
a piece of meat. I object to this kind
of lazy writing no matter which sex is being objectified, not only because it’s
demeaning to the subject of the objectification, but it’s also movie-making
shorthand for pandering to a demographic without putting any creativity into
the finished product.
The film drags on for an hour, feebly attempting to make us
care about the gladiator’s slave status and the rich girl’s sufferance at the
hand of a powerful Roman noble with intentions to marry her against her
will. And the film tries hard at making
us care for these characters, but the problem is that these aren’t so much characters as cardboard archetypes for the audience to project themselves into
the fantasy. If you are there to see Kit
Harrington’s abs or to see some cool gladiatorial fighting, then parts of the
first two acts may sustain you until the volcano erupts, but Anderson has never
done well with making memorable characters, and this is no exception.
Of course, everyone going to see Pompeii knows the fate of the city and its inhabitants, so that
first hour of the film can be a restless one.
I just wanted the film to get on with it already. When the volcano finally does erupt, the
effects are pretty sweet. Fire rains
from the sky, the earth quakes, things explode.
All in all, it’s a fairly decent thrill ride to the climax. Problem is, none of it is all that engaging
when there’s no reason to care about the characters caught up in the
calamity. I watched this movie for the
special effects, and it kept cutting back to the main characters in their
clichéd struggle for romantic freedom.
Unfortunately, if you cut out all the character drama, the film would
only be about twenty minutes long, so it seems the film has no choice but to try to make Kit
Harrington to this decade what Leo DiCaprio was to the nineties.
Anderson isn’t the worst director out there. He knows how to compose a coherent film and
usually plays to his strengths by providing computer-generated monstrosities
causing people to die and things to blow up.
Problem is, as imposing as a volcano is, it’s still just a largely
inanimate mountain blowing up, completely devoid of any animated
personality. Anderson tried to
compensate by pumping the film full of character drama, the part of film-making
he sucks the most at. It obviously
didn’t work. Watching the film’s trailer
will give you an idea of what effects there are to see here, but don’t watch
the first hour of the actual movie in order to see the full spectacle.
Have feelings about Paul W.S. Anderson’s other work? Let me know in the comments below.
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