{"id":10849,"date":"2015-02-21T06:43:15","date_gmt":"2015-02-21T12:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=10849"},"modified":"2015-02-20T17:43:39","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T23:43:39","slug":"pompeii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=10849","title":{"rendered":"Pompeii"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here is what Pliny the Younger wrote when he set down his memories of the devastating volcanic eruption at Pompeii<\/a><\/strong>, in 79 AD: \u201cYou could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. There were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What\u2019s uncanny about his words, 1,935 years on, is how close he came to capturing the experience of watching the new Paul W. S. Anderson film about that very disaster: in our cosseted 21st-century lives, we may never know the twisting agony of roasting to death in a surge of pyroclastic debris, but here is the next worst thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Paul WS \u2013 not to be confused with Paul T, who made There Will Be Blood and The Master \u2013 cuts his action films from a one-size-fits-all template. Previous works have been based on sources as diverse as the martial-arts video-game Mortal Kombat and the Alexandre Dumas novel The Three Musketeers<\/a><\/strong>, although they all offer the same blend of computer-choreographed chasing, yelling and exploding.<\/p>\n