‘Pompeii’ At 10: A Disaster Movie That’s Actually Far Less Disastrous Than Its Paltry 27% Rotten Tomatoes Rating

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” The ad wizards who wrote that copy were certainly onto something when they created this memorable tagline, but Decider’s “Take Two” series was specifically formulated in a laboratory by the world’s foremost pop culture scientists to provide a second chance for movies that made a less than stellar first impression upon their original release.

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Judging by recent internet consensus, I apparently think about the Roman Empire far less than the average male my age. But I make up for it by thinking about the movie Pompeii — which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week — far more than anyone. During a recent stroll through a Pompeii exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, faced with actual artifacts of this ancient, horrifying disaster, I nonetheless couldn’t quell my urge to get home and rewatch Paul W.S. Anderson’s most underrated movie. 

There was a time when that term could have applied to almost any movies made by Anderson, forever fated to be confused with the beloved Paul Thomas Anderson. This isn’t the Paul Anderson who made There Will Be Blood; this is the one who was reviled by misguided ’90s fanboys and old-guard movie critics alike for video game adaptations like Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil and lowbrow sci-fi pictures like Soldier and Event Horizon. He’s also since gained an auteurist following for his stylish, unpretentious, oddly obsessive genre work, especially his films with his wife Milla Jovovich. (Their most recent collaboration, Monster Hunter, was unceremoniously tossed into pre-vaccination theaters in 2020, and may be his best film.) Yet Anderson’s 2014 historical disaster epic Pompeii remains one of least least-reclaimed, lost in the debate over which Resident Evil sequel is the best one, and stuck with a 27% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Indeed, it’s easy enough to understand why Pompeii still doesn’t get much respect, as it’s stealing from loftier pictures than Anderson’s usual nerd-friendly raiding of Aliens and Romero. Pompeii is a years-too-late Titanic knockoff crossed with a years-too-late Gladiator knockoff, setting the romance between lowly gladiator Milo (Kit Harrington) and higher-status governor’s daughter Cassia (Emily Browning) against the backdrop of the deadly Mount Vesuvius eruption that leveled Pompeii, among several other Italian cities, in 79 AD. There are pitfalls of using a real-life tragedy as disaster-movie fodder, no matter how many centuries removed; look no further than Pompeii’s opening moments, lingering overhead shots of computer-generated insta-fossilized corpses, with the obligatory choral wailing attempting to convey the gravity of the situation.

Anderson barrels past the potential bad taste with his usual pulpy style and snappy pacing; there’s something enormously appealing about a would-be historical epic that runs a tight 105 minutes with credits (without, it’s more like 98). Though Pompeii lies outside Anderson’s sci-fi-fantasy-horror comfort zone, it does play as a kind of fantasy-horror story, with plenty of time allotted for swordplay before the sudden nightmare of the natural world takes over. 

And despite the film’s many clichés, it does deviate from disaster movie orthodoxy in some novel ways. Rather than following a cross-section of characters in different positions and walks of life, it focuses mostly on Milo, his arena-opponent-turned-compatriot Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and Cassia, who returns to her hometown disillusioned with the men of Rome. When their various conflicts – primarily with the slimy Senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland) – are interrupted by the eruption, it fails to fully dwarf their petty human concerns. Instead, it’s just one more seemingly insurmountable obstacle thrown down in the paths of beleaguered yet cartoonishly resilient slaves. Nature simply asserts itself as the greater pulp-movie villain – which doesn’t mean that Senator Corvus quits trying to compete until the very end, in the fine tradition of Billy Zane attempting to murder people on the sinking Titanic. (It’s telling that in cherry-picking bits of disaster-movie history, Anderson happily selects some of the goofiest stuff.)

The most compelling performance in the film comes from Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, transcending his sidekick role with a gravity and physical presence that Harrington, frankly, can’t hope to match. Akinnuoye-Agbaje, probably best-known as Mr. Eko on TV’s Lost, is an underrated presence in genre movies, and I hope he works with Anderson again; he’s got exactly the right mix of seriousness and swashbuckling panache. Emily Browning, meanwhile, mostly plays semi-resourceful damsel in distress, a far cry from Milla Jovovich’s characters in Anderson’s movies, but Browning also has an archetypal, almost silent-movie quality that serves her well here and in the also-underappreciated Sucker Punch.

Unlike that half-brilliant, half-idiotic Zack Snyder picture, Pompeii isn’t trying to deconstruct its own genre. It’s more akin to the heightened sword-and-sandal style of Snyder’s most popular film, 300, the success of which this movie was likely hoping to emulate. (It was released just a few weeks prior to the actual 300 follow-up, the prequel 300: Rise of an Empire.) Compared to Snyder’s film, Pompeii is far more at ease with its pulpiness, and more interested in telling a briskly entertaining story than trying to sell itself as some kind of grand act of mythmaking. So many modern sword-and-sandal pictures strain for their pageantry and, especially, their unearned gravitas, not recognizing the folly and hubris of, say, attempting to remake Ben-Hur in 2016. Anderson seems to understand that so many Roman Empire epics are just juiced-up B-movies – or in any event, he understands that this is what he’s making, because that’s always what he’s making.  

That’s not to say that Anderson condescends to his material; just that Pompeii gloriously dispenses with the pretense of a history lesson in favor of gladiators tussling with Roman soldiers just before fire starts raining down on everyone. In keeping with that carny-barker quality, the movie was originally released in 3-D. The phony third dimension, which can be eye-popping but often far less realistic, is the perfect ironic stand-in for the way that “natural” disasters like the Vesuvius eruption eventually get flattened into trivia and entertainment – interesting stuff for a stereotypical middle-aged dad to think about at his leisure, even (or especially) when they’re incorporated into supposedly solemn museum exhibits. Whether this is a healthy process or appalling one, I can’t really say. Pompeii may not have much to say about the history of the Roman Empire but, like many of Anderson’s movies, it’s surprisingly revealing about the history of cinema. 

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.