PREPARE FOR VULCANOLOGY
This is a marvelous little tele-film that was recommended to me by none other than CHUD's own Soylent Green. It tells the tale of the final 24 hours in the town of Pompeii (and Herculaneum, everyone always forgets Herculaneum..) before Mt Vesuvius decided that it was sick of pesky humans habitating so close to it's slopes and decided to do something about the problem. It's available through the mail to patrons of the NETFLIX Corporation
My reactions:
1) The special effects are not great. They make Mount Doom look like Yellowstone from 2012.
2) There is an over reliance on pointlessly redundant narration* that serves little purpose other than reminding you that you're watching a Discovery Channel Docu Drama. The director of this piece could have used a lesson in "Show don't tell"
With all that said though the acting is great and the sets are not half bad. Sure, they're not ROME, but then again, pretty much everything other than ROME is not ROME.
Greatest thing ever? Signs point to 'yes'
The human performers who populate the cast are all very talented, and manage to get across to the audience a sense of the hopeless and pitiful terror that those caught in the wake of the event must no doubt have felt. Even without an Emmerich size effects budget, P:LD conveys a small degree of the grotesque horror that is 'death by pyroclastic surge'... no small feat.
Throughout the running time I kept sort of realizing in surprise that the acting and story were all quite good. The effects could mostly be over looked and the narration at least had the good sense to shut up and let some key moments speak for themselves. There is a great film here under the surface and I hope someone (other than Orlando Bloom and Polanski) some day make a big budget Pompey film
*So, yes, some of the narration was not great. However, there was one scene in the film where the words employed in the voice over were so shocking and nightmarish that I'm not sure that even the most expensive swirl of pixels could out do the atrocity that I imagined when the obliteration of Herculaneum via pyroclastic surge was described in vivid, forensic detail. To sum up, essentially the entire town suffered the fate of the nazis at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Ok, what am I talking about of course I want to see that rendered with pixels!
