A Moving Blog

Occasional celluloid musings from BarryG

Friday 27 August 2010

Centurion

British writer-director Neil Marshall gave the B-class horror genre a touch of experimental class with his 8-minute debut, Combat (1999). His first full-length movie celebrated the werewolf in a nightmare for six soldiers lost in Scotland (Dog Soldiers (2002), and he won many awards for his very special-effects-ive subterranean nail-biter about real cave women, Descent (2005). Next in his black spotlight was a futuristic plague, Doomsday (2008).


He's obviously addicted to blood and violence, as his latest UK production reveals graphically. Centurion revels in the gory tale of seven 2nd-Century survivors from the Ninth Legion who must hack their way back to Roman lines through the mists, snow and moorland territory of Scotland's merciless Picts.

The long-unconquered natives had ambushed the Legion, and captured its general. He's given a Russell Crowe-ish smiling stylishness and a buffed chest by Dominic West (back from the States and 60 episodes of The Wire). His band of valiant legionnaires are led by centurion Quintus Dias, presented primly by the equally buffed Michael Fassbender (Hunger and Fish Tank). He and West had recently worked together on The Devil's Whore, a successful UK TV four-parter, giving the casting director an easy job.

As always in a band-of-brotherly plot, and appropriately for a real Roman legion, there's a rainbow of ethnic characters, including a black and Greek. Quintus was the son of a slave gladiator, articulates better than anyone else (in modern English), and is fluent in Pict. The young Pict witch who conveniently appears in the last 30 minutes to tend legionnaires' wounds also speaks the language of the Empire, which is convenient for making her a love interest for Quintus (Imogen Poots, fresh from 28 Days Later, essaying a somewhat Irish accent).

Gorlacon, the Pict leader (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen), is also bilingual, and his fiercesome female double agent, Etain, is conveniently mute, so that Ukrainian Olga (Quantum of Solace) Kurylenko can concentrate on her Amazonian role as a nationalist tracker, archer, fast killer and woad-wearer.

Parallels can be seen between the Roman Empire's failure to subdue the Picts and modern Western empires' disasters in Vietnam or Afghanistan, and Marshall's gory screenplay includes a demonstration of ancient water-boarding. Ironically, though they triumph in the movie (forcing the Romans to retreat southwards, behind their under-construction Hadrian's Wall), the Picts lost out eventually. Their dead language is replaced by Gaelic (with subtitles in olde-styled fontes) and historians will nod merrily, noting that Latin is another defunct language.

This movie is a valiant effort, rendered watchable mainly by the sweeping, chilling photography of Scottish wildernesses by Sam McCurdy. Less appealing to gorefest lovers are the flying blood and body parts. Marshall and his SFX team seem to have employed a wild paint technique, presumably diminishing the air of reality intentionally to create a more cartoonish, less offensive representation of carnage.

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