Review: 'Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston' brings a dead city back to life

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Set us as preferred 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.Tom Hiddleston, the actor, first visited Pompeii in 1998, when he was 17, and found it similarly unforgettable, because “in Pompeii you can time travel.” (He’s not wrong.) He visited it again, after a fashion, for a few minutes in the first season of “Loki,” and he’s back now, walking the ancient empty streets, not too dead for dreaming, with a chimerical documentary, “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston,” premiering Wednesday on Nat Geo before streaming Thursday on Hulu and Disney+.As the title suggests, “Out of Time” 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 — welcome, Steven Tuck (whose latest book is “Escape From Pompeii”) and his amazing spreadsheet — 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, “I need to combine the historical evidence with what I do as an actor, I need to imagine it.” 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 “amateur classicist.” Television The actor known for playing Loki in the MCU time travels to Pompeii in his new series for NatGeo, which is part travelogue, documenta...