The ANNOTICO Report
"Pompeii: The Last Day", AD 79, and you live near Mount
Vesuvius. But not
for long. It all lasted just 19 hours.
Then, there was only a long, deathly silence. Pompeii
lay buried for nearly
1,700 years. It wasn't until 1748 that archaeologists
began slowly
uncovering the ancient city, preserved under 9 feet of
volcanic ash and
frozen in time by Pliny the Younger's vivid report, written
just 18 years
later.
About three-fifths of the city has been liberated from
the solidified
volcanic ash and pumice that engulfed it. But many questions
remained
unanswered for a long time.
What exactly did happen that summer day in A.D. 79?
If you must miss the
TV Presentation, you must check out The Discovery Channel
Web Site.
The Site includes: What Happened Here; A Step Back in
Time; Pompeii's
EyeWitness Account; The Ongoing Excavations (Still
uncovering relics
today); Virtual Volcanoes;
Pompeii Quiz; and an Eruption Video.
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/
pompeii/pompeii.html
HISTORY HAS ITS UPS AND DOWN
RE-CREATION TREATMENT OF THE DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII
Los Angeles Times
By Robert Lloyd,
Times Staff Writer
January 28,2005
The Discovery Channel's "Pompeii: The Last Day" takes
us to AD 79, when
Vesuvius blew its top, and is an historical re-creation
that concern green
and pleasant lands overtaken by an unstoppable force.
There are real people portrayed in "Pompeii: The Last
Day", a 2003 BBC
production imported to the Discovery Channel, but the
filmmakers have the
advantage of their subjects having been dead 2,000 years;
no one's going to
challenge their portrayal of Pliny the Elder. A kind
of illustrated
documentary or educational disaster movie, it tells the
story of a very bad
day on the Bay of Naples, when the cities of Pompeii
and Herculaneum were
buried in waves of gaseous volcanic sludge.
We see not quite enough of the bustling life of the town
before the
mountain goes volcanic, but then this isn't about the
life of the town so
much as its death. "The people don't even know it's a
volcano," the
narration tells us. (Having no word for "volcano," as
we are later
informed, they couldn't have.) The filmmakers focus on
the lightly
intertwined lives of several luckless citizens ? Altman
does Pompeii ? in
well-written, well-played scenes that do not tax our
credulity. They play
out their ends in noble gestures or acts of random greed,
family feeling or
domestic dispute, though not before such ironic last
words as "The beams
are solid, don't fuss."
Well, they hadn't counted on the pyroclastic surge (an
avalanche of ash and
gas) or the toxic fumes. The physics of their demise
are spelled out in
disturbing detail.
As to the villain of the piece, the CGI (Computer Generated
Images) volcano
that destroys the CGI Pompeii is a pale imitation of
what the real thing
must have been, but there is no file footage available,
and until Peter
Jackson takes on a remake of 1935's "The Last Days of
Pompeii," this
version will do nicely.
'Pompeii: The Last Day'
Where: Discovery Channel
When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday
Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
Tim Pigott-Smith... Pliny the Elder
Jonathan Firth... Stephanus
Jim Carter... Julius Polybius
Executive producers Michael J. Mosley and Jack Smith.