YMMV / Pompeii

• Cliché Storm: Just about the only original thing in the movie is the mashing of gladiator movie clichés with disaster movie clichés.
• Complete Monster: Roman Senator Corvus is a sneering, arrogant aristocrat who feels he can do whatever he wants. Starting the film with a brutal slaughter of a Celtic tribe, Corvus murders the mother of the young hero Milo, though the boy escapes and later becomes a slave at the city of Pompeii. When Milo becomes attached to the Roman noblewoman Cassia, whom Corvus lusts for, Corvus promises to spare him for Cassia's sake but has him and another Gladiator named Atticus chained in the Arena to be slaughtered by Roman soldiers to recreate Corvus's victory over the Celts. When Cassia protests, Corvus tells her he simply wants her as a possession that he can break and that she will "stay broken," to beg and crawl as he demands. Corvus blackmails her family into agreeing to the marriage by threatening to accuse them of treason and murders Cassia's father when Mt. Vesuvius erupts. To get to safety, Corvus kills innocent civilians and even abandons his loyal dragon Proculus while attempting to abduct Cassia and escape.
• Harsher in Hindsight: in October of the same year as the film’s release 68 people were killed when Mount Ontake in Japan erupted without warning just before noon when hundreds were on the mountain. Footage taken by people on the slopes show just how fast and silent the eruption came with one victim at the summit having only able to snap one photograph before the pyroclastic flow struck them. Just like in Pompeii all 68 victims were either killed by heat, toxic fumes, or hit by flying rocks. Five of the dead still haven’t been recovered from the mountain. Despite the hundreds of people on the slopes that day, the number of fatalities were so low due to the pyroclastic flow at Ontake being a phreatic (steam explosion) generated ‘cold surge’ that went no further than the summit area while the ones at Vesuvius that consumed Pompeii and the surrounding area were magmatic ‘hot surges’ caused by the eruption column continually suffering fountain collapses.
• Just Here for Godzilla: About everyone only came to this movie to either see the volcano eruption or Jon Snow.
• Moral Event Horizon: If you, or the gods, still had any sympathy for Senator Corvus after everything he had done, that evaporated with five ill-chosen words in the arena that ensured that the wrath of the gods would fall upon Pompeii:
  Senator Corvus: KILL HIM! KILL HIM NOW!
• Narm:
  • The admittedly rather epic-looking flood is kind of ruined by the comedy of a boat drifting perfectly into a street and then perfectly plugging up the hole it rams into.
  • During the hail of rocks from the second stage of the eruption, a hapless extra next to the protagonists gets walloped right in the head by a huge, bouncy stone. The volcano has remarkable aim.
• Narm Charm: Positive reviews of the film emphasize that it's still a pretty fun, old-fashioned disaster movie despite all the cliches.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The destruction of Pompeii is rife with documented stories that could have made great movies, but instead we get a completely fictional, generic story that only involves the volcano in the last half hour.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The volcano eruption is indeed the best part of the film.