Movie Muser

It becomes clear fairly early on that director Paul W.S. Anderson would like Pompeii to be his Titanic – creating a movie that spends the first half building romance and intrigue before throwing a massive disaster at it, and then hoping the audience will be suitably moved. Indeed there are moments where the parallels become slightly overbearing.

However what Anderson seems to have forgotten is that he’s the director of Alien Vs. Predator, Death Race, The Three Musketeers and Soldier, all of which have had great ambition and plenty of good ideas but got crushed under his rather cack-handed and condescending approach to filmmaking.

And sadly Pompeii is no exception.

Kit Harington plays Milo, a slave from Britain who watched his entire tribe get slaughtered by the Romans when he was just a child. Now a grown man with a reputation as a fighter in Londinium, he is traded and taken to Pompeii to fight in the gladiatorial arena. Along the way he meets Cassia (Emily Browning), the free-thinking daughter of the man who runs Pompeii. Like Milo, she’s not a fan of Rome either, despite her rather higher position in society.

Cassia has her own issues, as Roman Senator Corvus (Keifer Sutherland) has his eye on her and plans to take her as his wife, no matter what she thinks about the matter. Rather than Corvus, Cassia begins to fall for Milo, with their fates becoming ever more entwined in the run up to the volcano that will destroy the city and ensure the special effects budget gets a good workout.

There are a handful of brilliant ideas in Pompeii, but they are utterly and completely consumed by the nonsense surrounding it. In the special features they talk about all the effort and research that went into making Pompeii a real place, but sadly it doesn’t work. Like with many of Anderson’s other movies, there’s too much of a sheen of glossy fakeness about it, so you’re constantly reminded you’re watching a movie (not helped by the fact that in the home most people won’t be watching it in the three-dimensions it was obviously designed for). Hell, Middle Earth is more believable than this.

It might have been able to overcome this with a good plot and characters, but quite frankly soap opera writers would cringe at some of the shenanigans that go on here. That’s particularly true of the villains (largely anyone who’s a Roman), who seem to spend every minute of every day trying to work out how much of an asshole they can be. I quickly started wondering how on earth this Empire had ever become so great, if we’re supposed to believe everyone in Rome was so busy moustache twirling and doing things that even a panto villain would think were ham-fistedly plotted.

It might still have been okay if the disaster was good, but it’s not that brilliant. It feels a bit too frenetic and badly explained. Obviously the Romans had no idea what was happening when Vesuvius erupted and so it can’t have someone sitting there explaining exactly why there’s been a tsunami, what the hail of pumice is all about and the fluid dynamics of the pyroclastic flow that eventually buries the city, but here it’s all presented as merely a succession of things happening, where it feels the eruption has been edited to suit the story rather than because it’s even vaguely close to what it was like. Indeed the entire film’s air of unreality is its biggest flaw, especially when it’s dealing with one of the most infamous natural disasters in history.

Like so many of Anderson’s movie, Pompeii is a film where it’s clear what it wants to be – Titanic meets Gladiator, essentially – but it seems to have little clue what it is that worked about those movies, beyond an obviousness that’s a bit like a jackhammer to the brain.

Overall Verdict: Pompeii is a great setting for a movie, but it needs more than a half-baked love story and dialogue that a soap opera writer would cringe at. And it would help if it was set in a world that felt at least vaguely real.

Special Features:
Director’s Commentary
Deleted Scenes
‘Buried in Time’ Featurette
‘The Weapon’s of Pompeii’ Featurette
‘The Assembly’ Featurette
‘The Journey’ Featurette
‘The Gladiators’ Featurette
‘The Volcanic Eruption’ Featurette
‘The Costume Shop’ Featurette

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Most shows that have made it to Season 9 are long past their prime and are pretty much coasting until the day they get cancelled, while everyone involved makes as much cash as they can in the meantime. However that’s not true for Bones, which is still fun, entertaining and slick, with a great cast and a good mix of crime-solving and humour.

Season 8 left things on a bit of a cliffhanger, with fiendish serial killer Christopher Pelant forcing FBI Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) to break off his engagement to forensic anthropologist Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan (Emily Deschanel), without even allowing him to tell her why. It certainly adds a lot of angst to the early part of the season, although it does become a little annoying and over the top.

Bones has always had a tendency to go a little too far with its recurring villains and that’s certainly true with Pelant, who gets to the point where you feel the only way for what he does to make sense is if he reveals that he’s got magical superpowers.

Thankfully though the other thing Bones has been good at is realising it’s gone too far and then quickly cutting it off, and that’s what happens here. That allows the show to go back to what it does best – giving us gory crimes where there’s very little of the victim left, and then Temperance using the skeleton to piece together what happened and who the killer is.

Sure it’s a bit silly but it’s also a lot of fun. In Season 9 Temperance has to sort out everything from the death of a sperm donor to man whose body went through a meat grinder. There are also plenty of personal issues to deal with, from one of Bone’s interns contracting a potentially deadly illness to her interrupted engagement. But after nine years – much of if spent in will-they-won’t-they get it together mode – will Brennan and Booth finally make it down the aisle? And while there is an ongoing plot about the Ghost Killer, that’s largely a damp squib.

It’s not high art but it’s not meant to be. It is though an incredibly entertainment procedural show, helped immensely by a good cast who all seem to enjoy what they’re doing. It’s a series that knows what it’s doing and even nine seasons in it’s still doing it well.

Overall Verdict: Far more fun than a show full of mutilated corpses probably should be, nine seasons in Bones is still a great show.

Special Features:
Deleted Scenes
Audio Commentary
Featurettes
Gag reel

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Michael Fassbender is a top actor who can have his choice of roles, so it initially seemed bizarre that he wanted to make a movie where he spends the vast majority of the runtime with a giant papier-mâché head covering his face. However as I watched more of the movie, I began to realise what an interesting role it must have seemed from his perspective.

For a start it means he has to create a performance and a character with just his body and voice, something he does an extremely good job of. It’s also gives him a chance to play a surprisingly interesting person as it begins to reveal more and more about the man inside the head.

The big bonce is based on Chris Sievey’s famed comedy creation, Frank Sidebottom, and those who remember the character’s unique brand of northern comedy may expect something similar from the movie. However, apart from the head it’s not really based on Sievey all that much, having more in common with the likes of Captain Beefheart and Daniel Johnstone.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Jon, a young man living a dull life but with dreams of being a musician – even if he’s having difficulty actually completing a song. Almost by accident he ends up playing with a band led by the eccentric but possibly brilliant Frank (Fassbender), who doesn’t just wear a giant head onstage, but keep it on 24/7.

Jon ends up going with Frank and the other band members to a remote house where they plan to write an album that will show off the group’s avant garde skills. However as the music writing process stretches out over months they become more and more like a little cult centred around Frank.

While it initially goes well, when the outside world begins to encroach on their idiosyncratic and rather surreal setup, the band starts to unravel, as does Frank’s mental state.

Frank is certainly a peculiar film that starts off surreal and somewhat disjointed, pulling you into the humour and peculiarities of the situation, while showing you why Jon is so drawn into this bizarre world, where for the first time in his life he feels like he’s part of something special.

However it’s not just strangeness and people running around with giant heads on, as underneath it there’s a strong emotional throughline that ensures that when things turn dramatic and rather sad towards the end, it packs a surprising punch. It also proves far more thought provoking than you’d think as an exploration of mental illness, especially the tendency in some circles to refuse to see the truth of the effects it can have on people.

To be honest I was surprised by how effective the film actually is and that it manages to find far more depth in its setup than you’d ever expect. From the outside it’s difficult not to think that the idea of Michael Fassbender in a giant papier-mâché head is ridiculously gimmicky, but before long it becomes clear that the film couldn’t be any other way. It’s a movie that looks at the way reality often isn’t how we’d like it to be and that if we obscure it, it’s easy to mythologise and ignore the truth underneath.

Overall Verdict: A bizarrely compelling movie that’s about far more than just a papier-mâché head, mixing plenty of drama and humanity with it humour and odd surrealism.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac