Libera te Tutamet: Pompeii (2014)

One of the most critically and popularly maligned filmmakers of the past 30 years, Paul W.S. Anderson has finally begun to experience the beginning of an overdue evaluation. In honor of Anderson’s 60th birthday this month, this weekly series will each Monday celebrate the infamous “video-game movie” digital auteur behind films like Resident Evil, Pompeii and, most recently, In the Lost Lands. “Libera te Tutamet,” a Latin phrase featured in his Event Horizon, means “save yourself from hell.” Although sometimes compromised in their time or ahead of their time, Anderson’s films offer an alternative path forward for blockbuster filmmaking while still keeping one eye turned to the past.

And what is that worth, Senator Quintas Attius Corvus? You killed my family, you slaughtered my people, and make no mistake, my gods are coming for you.

The material change of destruction tends to conclude and ruin lives. Destruction isn’t normally depicted as something beautiful. Paul W.S. Anderson, the maligned and masterful auteur behind several monumental 21st-century films (including Resident Evil: Retribution), proves it can be otherwise in Pompeii. Anderson’s 2014 masterpiece about the first-century eruption of Mount Vesuvius that devastated the Roman city of Pompeii imagines one of the most infamously tragic human events ever recorded as romantic, liberatory and downright beautiful.

The film opens with a quote from a philosopher, Pliny the Younger, and it’s not a complete coincidence that the film is so philosophically imbued. Anderson might be the biggest Leftist-inclined filmmaker in Hollywood to the extent that working inside such a system is even possible. His career opened with rebellious teenagers indulgently defacing mega-corporate property in 1994’s Shopping, and one of the most memorable images of Retribution is the Soviet hammer and sickle decorating the elevator of the Umbrella Corporation headquarters in the Russian Arctic rising in glory with Milla Jovovich’s Alice, transporting her to the film’s climatic battle. Karl Marx is never too far away from Anderson.

In his Theses On Feuerbach, Marx famously wrote “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” To change the world, in the context of Marx and the politics of liberation, entails answering the question of revolution. How can the world be remade before it has been undone? How violent is the process of remaking the world? Anderson’s Pompeii comes as close as any film since perhaps Sergei Eisenstein in expressing a hope (and belief) that the world can, in fact, be changed. But he does something I’m not sure Eisenstein ever did: He makes the destruction of the old order beautiful.

The Romans destroyed the Celtic horse villages and now have made a gladiator out of the enslaved Milo, played by a sculpted Kit Harington. They bring him not to the Eternal City, as someone calls Rome here, but to Pompeii. The mountain “talks” and grumbles, its inevitable explosion a dark presence lurking over the mise-en-scène. Milo knows the promise of freedom within the arena is an impossibility; the authorities would gain nothing in such an exchange of rights, although the idea of it inspires the fighters and inspired fighters lead to more entertaining battles, which, of course, helps the bottom line of those benefiting from the combat sports in the arena in the first place. Milo meets another gladiator, Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and they grow from gladiatorial opponents to comrades-in-arms against the empire. Milo also meets his beautiful Roman lover, Cassia (an underappreciated Emily Browning), the daughter of the Pompeii governor.

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.