This was actually a movie that I spent money to go see in theatre being as the storyline of The Eruption Of Mount Vesuvius was always very interesting. The script should have followed what was known.. not conjecture. I'd have rather given my 12 Bucks to a homeless guy and that would have been a better story and plot.

It is Gladiator meets Volcano as Hollywood Hack Paul W S Anderson once again strives to make a passable film and fails.Milo (Kit Harington) is a slave called the Celt from ancient Briton was as a child saw his people massacred by cruel Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland.)Milo is now a gladiator brought to Pompeii as the nearby mountain is about to erupt. Milo is due to battle mighty Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who needs just one more victory to become free.Milo's horse whispering abilities has also brings him close to a roman woman Cassia (Emily Browning) as she arrives in Pompeii to be with her wealthy family. Hot on her heels is Corvus, who wants to marry Cassia and is the new senator of Pompeii.However as Pompeii spews its volcanic ash, Milo sees his chance to get revenge on Corvus.The film is utter tosh. The first hour is a thin story with zero characterisation. The second hour moves from Gladiator to a Roman disaster story.

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.

Pompeii is probably the one city of the ancient Roman era we know the most about thanks to the fact that the eruption froze the city in time - we know what people talked about, what they worked with, what their concerns were.And yet, the one movie about the destruction of Pompeii unfortunately focuses more on a gladiator than any one else in the city. And that is so unfortunate, since with Spartacus, Gladiator and a few other features, it seems Hollywood has locked itself up with a gladiator that refuses to let them out. So instead of a movie about the actual retired Syrian marine (for example) who worked as a bronze maker and his day to day, we get another hack n' slash. it's lazy, but even worse it's plain cowardice, that Hollywood couldn't make this movie more about the actual people of Pompeii.So it was a disappointment from a script perspective, but the historical accuracy also left a lot to be desired, and the CGI was... abysmal. I'm not one who really notices matte paintings that much in movies, but here it was painfully obvious, and all the damn time.So all in all, what I thought would be a disaster movie set in history, just turned out to be something that should not have been made.Watch Gladiator, Rome or Spartacus instead. It's not about an exploding mountain, but their production values are way higher.