Skip to content

Paul W.S. Anderson

Pompeii * Paul W.S. Anderson (2014)

I guess the director was the only reason this film landed on my to-see list. The rating on IMDb.com certainly not (5.6). On the other hand, I did not like the two other films of this director that I reviewed… So if that was the reason, I should perhaps mixing up Anderson’s? Then again, the three W.S.’s that I now review(ed) are neither really good, but also not really bad.

This film is totally different from the sci-fi spectacles “Event Horizon” and “Resident Evil”. We start with the Romans butchering a Celtic village. Only a small boy survives. 17 Years later the boy is a gladiator and one of the best. In Pompeii he meets Atticus, his biggest rival. The two not only share cell, but are also doomed to fight eachother.
Also in Pompeii, “the Celt” meets Cassia who on her turn is followed by Corvus from Rome to Pompeii, exactly the reason she left.
All this unsurprisingly comes together and the story has some other unsurprising turns. As the title suggests, the destruction of Pompeii by the Vesuvio vulcano makes part of the film. This allows the director to add some apocalyptic spectacle towards the end.

“Pompeii” is a 13 in a dozen historical spectacle with no surprises. It is not a boring watch, but certainly not a recommended one either.

Resident Evil * Paul W.S. Anderson (2002)

This film starts as a high tension sci-fi thriller, but inspite of that tension, it is not that good. The too eleborate introduction to the film promises more story than is needed. Halfway the film drops into an unimaginable zombie slasher causing another drop in level.

In some future a big company has a big underground laboratory for secret experiments. Something does wrong, the AI defence system takes over and a small group of soldiers has to enter the city to shut down the main computer. Anderson apparently could not choose a genre and he goes from sci-fi thriller to gory horror to drama to action, coming to an unbalanced, not too well acted and story-wise uninteresting film.

I guess this film is for people who feel like some mindless action.

Event Horizon * Paul W.S. Anderson * 1997

How many times a friend of mine told me to watch this film with me replying “well, it is scifi, and I don’t like that”, so after asking if I have seen it a few dozens of times, he put a tape in my hands… Ah well then.
So, “Event Horizon” proved to be everything I feared: a Holywood scifi. Based on a thin story about worm-holes (as if creating these will be experimental in 2045, they have been working out theories about that for years) and the things that the spaceship picked up from ‘another place’ (“fear” of course), the people of the “Event Horizon” didn’t live to tell about their experiences and when the maker and a few other go visit the ship after it returned our very universe, things turn a bit in the way of a horror which is not too well done (very cheap computer animations), credible or enjoyable.
Better filmtips in this section for sure!