“Pompeii: The Last Day”
Tomorrow night at 9 on Discovery
(three stars)
THE city of Pompeii is without a doubt one of the most fascinating archaeological finds of all time. The city, buried nearly 2,000 years ago by tons of ash that covered the area during and after the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, remains bizarrely intact.
Sunday night’s “Pompeii: The Last Day” (not to be confused with the old classic flick, “The Last Days of Pompeii”) on Discovery Channel is a quite good attempt at recreating what happened that fateful day to the city in general and to some of its citizens in particular.
The special, using world-class actors, and even better effects, follows the fate of several people taken from “scientific evidence unearthed at Pompeii and the nearby Herculaneum,” as well as the written first-person account of eyewitness Pliny the Younger.
First off, it’s refreshing just to see a documentary (any documentary) that doesn’t rely on shots of running feet to depict all the drama and trauma. Yes, “Pompeii: The Last Day,” is a documentary with dialogue!
Secondly, it’s quite effective to have actors playing the parts of actual citizens who were in Pompeii (most of whom died there) on the day of the eruption. Each character is based upon a real person from evidence gathered from their skeletons and written accounts.
In the case of a slave girl, for example, a story is built around where and how she was found (in a cheap hotel wearing a bracelet with an inscription from her smitten master).
They also bring to life Julius Polybius (Jim Carter), the freed son of a slave who became a rich baker; Stephanus (Jonathan Firth), a social-climbing launderer who elected to stay and die rather than lose his fortune by fleeing; Fortunata (Rebecca Clarke), Stephanus’ frightened young wife whose skeleton was found in the gladiator’s barracks (hmmm); and Celadus (Robert Whitelock), a gladiator whose skeleton was found with Fortunata and a wounded comrade.
Also documented are Pliny the Younger (Martin Hodgson), a teenage writer who declines to go on the rescue effort, but remains behind to write and leave a detailed description of the actual events of the day; and Pliny the Elder (Tim Pigott-Smith), the renowned scholar, lawyer, scientist and admiral of the Roman fleet (shessh, what a guy!), who dies attempting a naval rescue of the people trapped in Pompeii via the Bay of Naples.
The graphics are terrific and the story that holds it all together is quite good. I actually learned more from this documentary than I did visiting Pompeii in person. For example, I did not know that the people of Pompeii had no idea that Mt. Vesuvius was a volcano since it hadn’t erupted in about 1,800 years, so they just built a city near it. Why the modern people have done the exact same thing again, no one has ever explained to me, however.
What I did learn from being in the actual city that you will not (repeat will not) learn from “Pompeii: The Last Day”- or probably anywhere else outside of this column – is that in the thriving newer city, everyone seems to wear, buy, or otherwise be obsessed with corduroy. Even the baby stores sold almost only corduroy clothes!
The second astounding Pompeiian fact: On Sunday evenings, thousands of people pack the streets to walk (passeggiare) at a very mad pace around and around the outskirts of the old city. Since almost everything is closed, it’s impossible to know what they’re all rushing to.
Maybe they want to stay in good shape in case ole Smokey pops off again, and given the every 2,000 year timetable described in the special, that should be, let’s see . . . any second now.