Most of the reviews capture the main elements of the movie. If it missed a cliché, I missed the missing of it. Just an example. We know that in slasher movies the supposedly dead villain leaps back to life. The earliest and best example of such an event is from "Wait Until Dark" (1967). Here, one of the more dislikable heavies -- Kiefer Sutherland as the pompous representative of Rome -- gets to pull the stunt twice.
There are three blacks in the movie. They're all friends and caretakers of the white people. One by one, they are picked off. Usually the white hero and heroine (Kit Harrington and Emily Browning) get away alive, but in this case everyone perishes, with the two lovers turned into upright statues of ash.
Those clumsy looking human forms that we've all seen from Pompeii are interesting. None were upright, of course. Pompeii was buried under thirty feet of ash, left alone for some 1,700 years, until in the early 19th century some of the men wielding shovels found that their shoes sometimes broke through the crust into hollows below. Then archaeologists began to locate the holes and fill them with plaster.
But that's neither here nor there. Without giving the matter much if any importance, I picked up scenes (or suggestions of scenes) from "Gladiator," "Spartacus," "Titanic," "The Horse Whisperer". and one or two others I've forgotten.
In return for sitting through the formulaic events, you get in return a massive display of visual effects: flaming meteors, boulders falling from the sky, a giant tsunami, fires, earthquakes, landslides, a monstrous pyroclastic flow, and praising the chocolate cake at one of your own restaurants. It's such a shattering experience it will make you think twice. Twice but not three times.
Informative datum. Pompeii had a red light district and the cobblestone street was worn down an inch or so by the heavy wagon traffic, like inverted railroad tracks.
There are three blacks in the movie. They're all friends and caretakers of the white people. One by one, they are picked off. Usually the white hero and heroine (Kit Harrington and Emily Browning) get away alive, but in this case everyone perishes, with the two lovers turned into upright statues of ash.
Those clumsy looking human forms that we've all seen from Pompeii are interesting. None were upright, of course. Pompeii was buried under thirty feet of ash, left alone for some 1,700 years, until in the early 19th century some of the men wielding shovels found that their shoes sometimes broke through the crust into hollows below. Then archaeologists began to locate the holes and fill them with plaster.
But that's neither here nor there. Without giving the matter much if any importance, I picked up scenes (or suggestions of scenes) from "Gladiator," "Spartacus," "Titanic," "The Horse Whisperer". and one or two others I've forgotten.
In return for sitting through the formulaic events, you get in return a massive display of visual effects: flaming meteors, boulders falling from the sky, a giant tsunami, fires, earthquakes, landslides, a monstrous pyroclastic flow, and praising the chocolate cake at one of your own restaurants. It's such a shattering experience it will make you think twice. Twice but not three times.
Informative datum. Pompeii had a red light district and the cobblestone street was worn down an inch or so by the heavy wagon traffic, like inverted railroad tracks.