Pompéi

Let's start with the positive: the movie looks great, the visuals and effects really work. Little else does, though. The cast acts wooden, the story is predictable and boring, borrowing many elements from Gladiator and the end is cheesy as hell. Overall a real waste of time.

While not a classic, Pompeii is actually a pretty enjoyable disaster/action flick that I couldn't wait to see back in 2014. I remember enjoying it in cinemas and have just watch it again for the 2nd time. I really need to get around to watching the 24 minutes of cut footage as I feel several characters were highly underused, especially Carrie Ann Moss and Jessica Lucas. While the ending still kinda annoys me, I really don't think it could've ended any other way.

It's fast paced, has some great action scenes and is an overall pretty decent. Nowhere near as bad as others are making out to be. I wish Emily Browning would make more big budget movies.

You can take this movie from two different sides.

As somebody who is very much interested in history and geography and has studied both for many years, this movie is obviously full of mistakes and wrong stereotypes. It is almost as inaccurate as the "Spartacus" series. And this is never an original movie. We have all watched movies with very similar story lines about the evil Romans who want to control everything, the poor gladiators who stand up against them and the forbidden love between a rich young woman and a foreign slave. I can understand why many people are rating this film down. If you really want to watch a sophisticated movie about that time, go for the classic "Ben- Hur".

What I think is strange is that all these stereotypes were highly predictable from the trailers only. I am asking myself why people even went to watch this movie if they were going to hate it for the reasons mentioned above. Some people just want to bash a movie and seem to have a very sad life if they waste their time watching movie they dislike so much.

I went to watch the movie for something different. I wanted to watch a colourful movie with impressive sets and costumes and stunning 3D effects of an exploding volcano. I was eager to watch a fast pace flick with a lot of fighting scenes, some tension here and there and maybe a few love scenes with beautiful actresses. And I exactly got that.

In addition to this, the acting was just good enough and included a few interesting characters. I really liked Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Jessica Lucas in this film even though they played stereotypical characters and could have had more screening time. If you are going to watch this movie for Carrie-Anne Moss or Kiefer Sutherland, please do not. They have been much better in other movies in the past.

In the end, it all depends on you. If you want to watch an original and profound movie and learn something about the Roman Empire, just forget it. If you want to watch a effect ridden action adventure, you are going to like this. It is not the movie of the year but I surely had a great time watching it.

I got dragged to see this. I knew it was going to suck. It sucked in a "it's so bad it's good" kind of way. I was never bored. Mostly laughing and saying, "You know nothing John Snow."

But you know a movie is bad when it ends with a scene that is supposed to be emotional and tragic, and the whole theater bursts out laughing.

I feel like there's no point in me going over how poorly written the characters were, because I'm sure everyone else has already done that. The romance was extremely random. It's like they didn't even care about the story.

To be fair, the visual effects were great, but really, today there are so many movies with great visuals, this one does nothing new. Although it turns out that the filmmakers did their research for this film and the set designs and the eruption were very true to fact (except for the lava bombs and the tsunami) and even the ash-figures we see at the end were based on (stress on based on) actual figures that were discovered. So that raises the film a bit in my respect.

Also,

Atticus: Which bastard will be the one I kill today? Me: Ned Stark's bastard.

Sorry. :P

Hollywood deals with an ancient catastrophe.

The above phrase contains all one needs to be aware with regards to Pompeii. Brilliant and breathtaking spectacle marred by superficial storyline.

We live the last days of Pompeii leading to the eruption of Vesuvius. A slave arrives in town in order to fight for his life as part of a spectacle for a senator from Rome. He befriends another gladiator and the daughter of the town's governor falls for him.

On the one hand, a great job has been done to escalate the audiences tension as we await for Armageddon to hit and the visual climax does not disappoint. The effects are spectacular and the destruction is displayed to its full core.

Sadly, whilst these men who were treated like animals and were an object of sport for their slave owners had a chance to escape they put everything to jeopardy for a girl crush who was also part of the system that oppressed them. Had this been presented from the angle of a friendship between two men that were to fight one another to death it would have some resonance but for some cheesy romance it proved a major anticlimax in the otherwise impressive high point leading to sheer indifference as to whether any of them survived or not.