“Pompeii” – Another Disastrous Volcano Movie

The next of my posts about movies which I studied for my article “Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?” is about Pompeii (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2014). It is another of the disaster movies featuring volcanoes in my study – alongside Dante’s Peak, Volcano and When Time Ran Out...

A summary on IMDb for Pompeii is as follows.

Set in 79 A.D., Pompeii tells the epic story of Milo (Kit Harington), a slave turned invincible gladiator who finds himself in a race against time to save his true love Cassia (Emily Browning), the beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant who has been unwillingly betrothed to a corrupt Roman Senator. As Mount Vesuvius erupts in a torrent of blazing lava, Milo must fight his way out of the arena in order to save his beloved as the once magnificent Pompeii crumbles around him.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1921064/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

None of the other volcano-centric disaster movies have particularly good ratings on IMDb, so my expectations were not high after I tracked down Pompeii. Sadly I wasn’t to be pleasantly surprised. But the main reason for watching was for my research, so I had to watch it and re-watch it as I double-checked to see what conventions were contained within, as well as look for out for potential new conventions. In the end, in terms of the revised list of conventions that I developed as part of my article “Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?“, the movie scored a 11 out of the 17. Overall it was yet another disaster movie that compromised storyline for the sake of showing off special effects – an issue that I have discussed in other posts.