{"id":2512319,"date":"2026-07-22T10:41:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T10:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2512319"},"modified":"2026-07-22T10:41:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T10:41:06","slug":"pompeii-out-of-time-with-tom-hiddleston-review-a-dead-city-revived","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/pompeii-out-of-time-with-tom-hiddleston-review-a-dead-city-revived\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston’ review: A dead city revived"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the fall of 1990, I found myself with a small band of touring musicians on a day off between Naples and Rome, in Pompeii. The world is full of amazing places, but this is one I got to see, and so it is my particular most amazing place. And because this was in the fall and well before the explosion of international tourism, we had the place virtually to ourselves. There is nothing quite like being (nearly) alone among the bones of a dead city.<\/p>\n

Tom Hiddleston,<\/a> the actor, first visited Pompeii in 1998, when he was 17, and found it similarly unforgettable, because \u201cin Pompeii you can time travel.\u201d (He\u2019s not wrong.) He visited it again, after a fashion, for a few minutes in the first season of \u201cLoki,\u201d<\/a> and he\u2019s back now, walking the ancient empty streets, not too dead for dreaming, with a chimerical documentary, \u201cPompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston,\u201d premiering Wednesday on Nat Geo before streaming Thursday on Hulu and Disney+.<\/p>\n

As the title suggests, \u201cOut of Time\u201d is less about the living city than the dying one, with a sliver of hope carved out of the ash, rubble and pyroclastic surge. The conceit is that recent scholarship \u2014 welcome, Steven Tuck<\/a> (whose latest book is \u201cEscape From Pompeii\u201d) and his amazing spreadsheet \u2014 has been able to identify citizens of Pompeii who turned up elsewhere after Vesuvius blew. In order to bring their story to life, says Hiddleston, \u201cI need to combine the historical evidence with what I do as an actor, I need to imagine it.\u201d Hiddleston, who studied classics in college, for which he credits his trip to Pompeii, and so speaks a little Latin, is puckishly identified in a title as \u201camateur classicist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The documentary focuses on three \u201creal Romans,\u201d asking whether they might have been among the survivors. (The host takes it personally.) In Pompeii, there are Avianius, a teenager apprenticed to a blacksmith, and Julia Felix, a rare female businesswoman who runs a kind of spa cum entertainment center for the well-to-do. Hiddleston, mistranslating the painted sign outside her door, comically \u201cmistakes\u201d her for a Julius, leading to a lesson, from Caitie Barrett (\u201chelpful archeologist and National Geographic Explorer\u201d) on women, property and self-determination in old Pompeii. And in Herculaneum, Pompeii\u2019s better-preserved, lesser-celebrated, posher sister buried city, the possessions of a praetorian guard found on what had been a beach \u2014 a sword, a belt and a money clip \u2014 give rise to an evacuation scenario: \u201cExperienced sailors prepare the boats,\u201d cries the imagined soldier. \u201cRich lady, I need a head count! Do we have any doctors? Everyone is getting off this beach!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an odd mix of styles, a sometimes hokey meta-nonfictional film, in which Hiddleston most always seems to be acting, even in his interviews, as he pretends to learn things he knows already or paces before a board covered with index cards, as in a writers room \u2014 that will prove less than a metaphor \u2014 fleshing out characters, musing to himself or addressing the audience. (\u201cI\u2019ve got to find a way of tracking that rescue mission.\u201d \u201cDo we have ourselves a classic redemption story?\u201d) He sets a timer on his watch, counting down to the eruption (\u201cOne. More. Hour\u201d). With Pompeii\u2019s sun blacked out, he stumbles around in the dark with a flashlight. It comes across as at once a little artificial and sincerely felt.<\/p>\n

Up on the rim of Vesuvius, he discusses volcano facts with Chris Jackson (\u201chelpful geoscientist\u201d). Seeking to get inside the minds of his subjects, he declares, \u201cI have to go further still, draw in evidence from disciplines beyond history,\u201d and meets with \u201cdisaster psychologist\u201d Sarita Robinson, latter dubbed \u201csurvival psychologist,\u201d who\u2019ll teach him about the amygdala and the \u201cfight or flight\u201d \u2014 but also the \u201cfreeze\u201d \u2014 response.<\/p>\n

The re-created history, which is where many historical documentaries fail, looks good, and the scenes the writers conjure up are well done, if verging sometimes on melodrama. The Avianius scenes can play a little like a first-century after-school special (\u201cYou\u2019re not my dad! You\u2019re just some blacksmith!\u201d), but as Julia Felix, Lubna Azabal projects an attractive matter-of-factness. Do any of them get away? Spoilers!<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is all a little goofy,\u201d I thought more than once watching \u201cOut of Time.\u201d Which isn\u2019t to say I didn\u2019t enjoy it greatly.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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