There is literally nothing else on this planet as bombastic as a volcanic eruption. And yet somehow, this immersive exhibition dedicated to the destruction of the Roman town of Pompeii by the fury of Mount Vesuvius does endeavour to be ‘a bit much’.
The Last Days of Pompeii: The Immersive Exhibition is the third show to hit London this year from the Spanish company Madrid Artes Digitales (aka MAD), who also made The Legend of the Titanic (which I didn’t see) and Tutankhamun (which I did).
The first thing you notice here is the thunderously loud and doomy soundtrack, which permeates every room. Later on you’ll discover that it’s the accompanying music to an immersive film that forms the centrepiece of the show.
But you won’t get to it for at least half an hour, and there’s something very silly about the nominally sober first area – an introduction to the Roman town of Pompeii and its pre-eruption history – being soundtracked by apocalyptic strings and eruption noises. Similarly, the second room contains casts of inhabitants of Pompeii in their final poses before they were entombed in ash. I’m not saying we need to be massive respectful to 2,000-year old dead Romans, but the figures are actually very moving – and would be even more so if you could turn off the overwrought score.
undoubtedly pretty sick if you’re 10, which is surely the point
While the rooms at the start are intended to be sensible, this all flies out of the window by the time we start with the immersive bits. The first of these is a VR film that shows a gladiatorial bout involving flame-spurting pillars that soundlessly retract into the floor as the amphitheatre floods with water to instantly turn into water-battle mode. Clearly this did not happen, but it is undoubtedly pretty sick if you’re 10, which is surely the point.
Likewise the immersive film, while having its quieter moments (some judicious quoting of Pliny the Younger), reaches the sort of climax Roland Emmerich might reject as OTT: boulders of flaming pumice the size of carthorses rain down on Pompeii, smashing stone buildings to smithereens.
Ultimately this sort of dementedly exaggerated, VR-enhanced approach to history is surely aimed at kids, teenagers, and adults whose attention span is so ravaged that a trip to the British Museum would cause them to instantly expire. And there’s no shame in that! Especially if you’re a parent wanting to take your kids to something that’ll shut them up for around 90 minutes and they’ll probably learn a bit.
I preferred the Tutankhamun exhibition, largely because its trippy immersive depictions of the Egyptian afterlife seemed fair game, really. On the other hand, Last Days of Pompeii’s embellishment of things that actually happened (and would still have been exciting if you’d depicted them accurately) seems a bit pointless. Still, if the inhabitants of Pompeii had known their final hours would have been exaggeratedly immortalised in a VR film I’m sure they’d have been flattered in their own way.
