Critics reviews

By carefully aligning his shots to create a sense of continuous screen direction, of coherent spaces unfolding in a consistent and meaningful manner, Anderson rediscovers a presence and physicality missing from many of today's CGI-generated blockbusters, even as he uses CGI techniques to create his screen spaces. By combining match cuts with the depth of field of digital 3-D, Anderson rediscovers the ideal of classical filmmakers: to create a whole world, rather than a jumble of impressions.

Pompeii feels both alien and inevitable in his cinema. None of Anderson's prior films are so deeply gestural as this; here he reduces romance to purely physical terms. Exchanges of glances, or the offering of a hand. Yet it feels entirely anticipated in his cinema. Resident Evil: Retribution and The Three Musketeers [2011] revel in bodies in motion, the grace of people within the director's rigorous lines. Pompeii fittingly reduces this to the bare essentials, for his first romance in proper.

Pompeii is a film defined by conviction. Unlike Anderson's previous films, there is a romantic element which, heretofore unseen in his movies, now becomes the primary focus, and being so sincere in its ambitions, Pompeii becomes a profoundly moving film.

Pompeii looks just sumptuous enough to offset its second-hand storytelling tactics, which embrace narrative and dramatic clichés like long-lost friends. And yet there's finally something likeable about a modern blockbuster that foreswears self-aware winking in the Roland Emmerich mode in favour of unblinking, misty- eyed melodrama.

Pompeii" may not be Anderson's best work. It lacks some of the snap of his "Resident Evil" movies and "The Three Musketeers," with its magnificent climactic battle between two enormous airborne galleons. (Nothing in any of the "Pirates" movies can touch it.) But it moves at a clip, never hangs heavy with pretense, and features at least one sequence that is as good as anything Anderson has done: the flood waters of the Bay of Naples rushing into the doomed city with tsunami-like power...

Once all the exposition is dealt with, Anderson unleashes his visual gifts. Working with the same tech team since his first 3-D feature, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Anderson and DP Glen MacPherson have mastered this reviled art form, enough to play around now with offhand grace notes... Anderson is obsessed with fully imagining and rendering the topographical layout of his film's spaces...

Had Anderson been able to instill the film with some of the playful wit that marks his best work, perhaps Pompeii's serious tone might not have felt so strained. But all this self-importance, amplified by the film's heavy reliance on CGI, feels like too much for a director who has often exhibited more impressive artistry when finding ingenuity within B-picture material.

As much bloodletting as happens in this movie—and there's quite a bit of it before the volcano action (presaged by a lot of building foundational cracks and such) gets underway—the movie is otherwise relentless in its wholesomeness... However, the action scenes are choice, and once the clouds of ash and shooting fire and churning seas start up, "Pompeii" achieves a momentum that most sensationalist studio fare can't touch.

[The pleasures of a PWSA film] are abundantly self-evident, and they couldn't be any easier to enjoy if they gave you a lap dance... He shoots swordplay at the speed of thought, making the viewer privy to the split-second, life-or-death process of assessment, analysis, and response. [His] set pieces are elegant illustrations of grace under pressure, and while he may have aligned himself with the barbarians here, the hard, Roman clarity with which he shoots marks him as something of a Classicist.

The film is bookended by reverential shots of ash-encrusted bodies frozen in time, and his muscular characters are all the more imposing in stereoscopic 3D. But narrative has never been Anderson's strength; the story here is a corny overhaul of James Cameron's already-corny Titanic.

Pompeii didn't have to be so boringly awful: Director Paul W.S. Anderson has elsewhere displayed a flair for stylish nonsense, particularly withResident Evil (2002), in which the concept of "supermodel versus zombies" approached delirious purity. But his efforts here are trammeled. There's not enough villainy—nor lip-smacking comeuppance—to justify a smiting by ash or falling column. The movie in your head melts ten times better.

Whether it's elaborate gladiatorial battles or a chariot chase through a burning city, Anderson directs with precision, rhythm, and ruthlessness – he has an eye and an ear for violence, for the visceral impact of a kill. At his best, he creates action sequences in which you feel anything might happen, even though you usually know how they'll turn out. And the ones in Pompeii are more engaging than those of any superhero movie I saw last year.