'Pompeii' and eternity.
A small write-up on Paul W.S. Anderson's 'Pompeii.' Needs a lot of work and would love to turn this into a much larger piece, but this is as it stays for now!
Anything that happens in Paul W.S. Anderson's Pompeii is a foregone conclusion: the volcano will erupt, the pyroclastic flows will come, and everyone will turn to dust. Like all movies based on true events, it must reckon with the fact that the ending has already been spoiled. In the case of Pompeii, the city, that’s an ending which has been spoiled and kept on display for nearly 2,000 years. You can visit tomorrow and see the mummified corpses in stasis, frozen in time and preserved for all to see. That’s what we think of when we hear "Pompeii"—not the people, not the city, but the explosion and the aftermath. The moment. What Anderson understands better than anyone is this museum can make a hell of a tourist attraction.
Milo (Kit Harington) is a Celtic horseman turned slave after the Roman's massacred his people and took him captive. It's been decades since then, and Milo has made a name for himself as 'The Celt', a warrior worthy of going to Pompeii to fight in the gladiator arena. On the way there he meets Cassia (Emily Browning), daughter to a famous merchant family in Pompeii and it's love at first sight. The two battle against the seeds of political corruption, the swords of the arena and Mount Vesuvius herself to be with each other.
All of these people will die, this love is cursed, and the colosseum will fall. It is a narrative dead end, so Anderson chooses to recontextualize what the explosion of Pompeii could mean. Naturally, it's an atrocity that no one can bear to imagine happening to them, but frame it from a slave's perspective: a man fighting back against the authoritarian government that murdered his people—he is dying on the mountain's terms, not on those who deem themselves worthy to sit atop it, with the love of his life, finally free. The beauty of Pompeii is that it makes this tragedy hopeful.
How does it do this? The opening genocide (every great historical epic must have one) sets the film up to be a decidedly gritty and realistic take on the genre. In fact, the first two-thirds of the movie follows suit. Traditional swords-and-sandals stuff—arguments turned brawls, dungeons, sand, and dulled blades. When Vesuvius begins to erupt, it becomes a feast for the eyes, especially in 3D. The established panoramic camera movements signal a shift from realism to idealized digital filmmaking: explosions, tsunamis, smoke, and fog. This is that moment we were talking about—the larger-than-life ideas of Pompeii stricken onto film.
It all leads to that one final shot which literalises what the film has been hinting toward: two figures in a black background, surrounded by nothing, contextualized only by each other. It’s the end of the Roman stronghold over the film, transcending the B-movie origins from which it comes to become something transcendent. Milo, in this moment, is a gladiator far stronger than the politics of Rome could make him. Cassia is a woman defined by her ability to disregard her own safety for the sake of a love that will last forever. They are both not themselves and are instead mannequins of the mountains making. This is the dust that Pompeii promised, and dust it shall stay, forevermore.