History has its ups and downs

Whether we remember history or not, it seems we are condemned to repeat it, at least those of us with a television, the natural home of documentaries and docudramas and biopics. Two sorts of historical re-creations are on view Sunday, both of which concern green and pleasant lands overtaken by an unstoppable force. The Discovery Channel’s “Pompeii: The Last Day” takes us to AD 79, when Vesuvius blew its top, while “See Arnold Run,” on A&E;, purports to tell the story of how Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California.

It’s not that I’m amazed, exactly, by the persistence of the biopic. I see that they are quick to hook an audience, with their promise to breach the locked doors and private minds of the high and mighty. But, pace “The Aviator,” nearly all such films are afflicted by an inherent less-ness -- they’re rarely the equal of their subjects, and nearly all fail as drama. At best, “See Arnold Run” gives you a glimpse into a guess at Schwarzenegger’s character, filtered through news files, hearsay and the screenwriter’s imagination.

The film jumps between two parallel tracks -- three, actually, but the third amounts only to a wordless childhood flashback -- set about 30 years apart. One, shot through with the orange light of memory, traces Schwarzenegger’s run-up to the 1974 Mr. Olympia competition (his fourth win), and the second follows his quest to become governor of “Kally-forn-ya.” The earlier moments are meant to illuminate the later, leading to the conclusion that what makes Arnold run is that his father liked his brother best. And although this may or may not be true, it’s dramatically such a cliche that it might have been better to just have made something up -- that he had a chip implanted in his brain by aliens seeking to control the world, or something. That would explain a lot, in fact.

With hardly a scene one could call “dramatic,” there is not much deep acting here, despite the estimable presence of Jurgen Prochnow (“Das Boot”) as 2003 Arnold and Mariel Hemingway as wife Maria Shriver, a hard nut who scares the spin doctors. “What is it that with everything I’ve accomplished I still want more?” Arnold wonders one night by his cement pond, as a Spanish guitar sounds pensively on the soundtrack. But Prochnow plays him not so much as a driven man as an intensely whimsical one, in the strictest sense of the word. Run for governor? Sure!

As prehistoric Arnold, Roland Kickinger (a former Mr. Austria, appropriately) has the better role, just because it’s the less familiar one. It also helps that he’s got a body quite as overdeveloped as Schwarzenegger’s. We see him flashing his pecs at beach bunnies; going on “The Dating Game”; studying his college math (“I must solve more equations”); promoting “Pumping Iron,” the documentary that thrust him into wider public view; and thinking positively (“I’m big, big, big and I’ll get bigger, bigger, bigger”).

It’s asking for trouble from the start, making a movie, especially a visibly low-budget movie, largely about events we all lived through, or at least near to, not two years ago and can easily compare to our own fresh memories. (Perhaps it will play more convincingly outside of California.) Unless you have a penchant for celebrity impersonation or some pathological nostalgia for 2003, I can’t see a reason to watch this film. It’s not even bad enough to be funny.

There are real people portrayed in “Pompeii: The Last Day” too, a 2003 BBC production imported to the Discovery Channel, but the filmmakers have the advantage of their subjects having been dead 2,000 years; no one’s going to challenge their portrayal of Pliny the Elder. A kind of illustrated documentary or educational disaster movie, it tells the story of a very bad day on the Bay of Naples, when the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried in waves of gaseous volcanic sludge.

We see not quite enough of the bustling life of the town before the mountain goes volcanic, but then this isn’t about the life of the town so much as its death. “The people don’t even know it’s a volcano,” the narration tells us. (Having no word for “volcano,” as we are later informed, they couldn’t have.) The filmmakers focus on the lightly intertwined lives of several luckless citizens -- Altman does Pompeii -- in well-written, well-played scenes that do not tax our credulity. They play out their ends in noble gestures or acts of random greed, family feeling or domestic dispute, though not before such ironic last words as “The beams are solid, don’t fuss.”

Well, they hadn’t counted on the pyroclastic surge (an avalanche of ash and gas) or the toxic fumes. The physics of their demise are spelled out in disturbing detail.

As to the villain of the piece, the CGI volcano that destroys the CGI Pompeii is a pale imitation -- a pale intimation -- of what the real thing must have been, but there is no file footage available, and until Peter Jackson takes on a remake of 1935’s “The Last Days of Pompeii,” this version will do nicely.

*

‘See Arnold Run’

Where: A&E;

When: 8 to 10 p.m. Sunday

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Mariel Hemingway...Maria Shriver

Jurgen Prochnow...Arnold Schwarzenegger (older)

Roland Kickinger...Arnold Schwarzenegger (younger)

Nora Dunn...Arianna Huffington

Executive producers Delia Fine, Gerald W. Abrams, Michael R. Goldstein and Matt Dorff. Director James B. Rogers, Writer Dorff.

**

‘Pompeii: The Last Day’

Where: Discovery Channel

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Tim Pigott-Smith... Pliny the Elder

Jonathan Firth... Stephanus

Jim Carter... Julius Polybius

Executive producers Michael J. Mosley and Jack Smith.