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You are there for Pompeii's last day

The disaster that destroyed the Roman city erupts on the small screen tonight, breathing life into a day from the history books.

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published January 30, 2005

If elementary school film strips were more like the Discovery Channel's latest docudrama, Pompeii: The Last Day, we would all know a whole lot more about volcanic ash and pyroclastic flow.

The British production, airing for the first time on American television tonight, blends archaeological evidence, surviving written accounts and cool special effects to create a dramatic account of Aug. 24, 79 A.D., the day historians say the Roman city of Pompeii was buried under 75 feet of volcanic debris.

Now a tourist destination famous for its stone casts of victims baked into statues by a rain of fiery rock and waves of superheated gas, Pompeii was once a booming city at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. An estimated 5,000 people died when the volcano exploded.

It's hard to imagine what it would be like to be caught in a disaster so massive.

Pompeii: The Last Day doesn't leave that scene up to the imagination.

Computer graphics, story lines built around what producers promise is archaeological evidence, and lots of rumbling explosions make the history lesson go down easy. It's a disaster flick, no doubt, but there's plenty to learn, too.

While the Discovery Channel may not be the first place viewers look for blockbuster Sunday night movie-of-the week fare, Pompeii has pretty much everything a fan of the disaster genre could want, without a cast of stars (who could forget O.J. Simpson in The Towering Inferno?).

Michael Glantz, a social scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, studies natural disasters and their effects on people. The attraction to disaster movies, he said in a phone interview, goes back decades.

"It's a little bit of the "There, but for the grace of God, go I' thing. It makes us feel lucky," he said.

Viewers of most disaster movies can learn something about themselves by imagining themselves in similar situations, he said.

People who scoffed at victims of the Asian tsunami who ran to the beach to watch the tide roll out, instead of heading for the hills before it rushed back in, should imagine what they would have done, Glantz said.

Pompeii does a solid job of helping viewers imagine what it was like when, for no explained reason, the earth started shaking, rocks started falling from the sky, clouds blacked out the sun and a wall of deadly gas and debris (here's that pyroclastic flow thing) buried thousands alive.

Pompeii: The Last Day, Discovery Channel, 9 p.m. today.

[Last modified January 28, 2005, 10:19:02]