William Bibbiani Reviews Centurion & Interviews Neil Marshall!
Wait, the Pict in this picture is already reeling… Did Michael Fassbender hit him on the upswing or something? How did this happen?
Centurion is not a great movie, but it sure is a neat one. Director Neil Marshall may be famous for directing the masterful modern horror classic The Descent, but for the bulk of his career he’s apparently been content to make above average quasi-remakes of 1980’s genre movies for the kind of people who read reviews on Geekscape. Dog Soldiers turned the often introspective werewolf genre and made it a balls-to-the-wall low budget action flick about marines fighting off wave after wave of lycanthropes, kinda like Aliens. Doomsday was the kind of post apocalyptic sci-fi action movie in which a badass with one eye has to go into an anarchistic war zone to retrieve a valuable MacGuffin from a group of madmen and cannibals, kinda like Escape from New York. Now comes Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which plays a lot like Walter Hill’s The Warriors but instead features actual warriors. Led by a centurion, if you can believe it.
The year is AD 117, and the Roman Empire is still expanding across Eurasia like a big… expanding… thing, but there’s a problem: The Picts. These deadly and barbaric fighters have been resisting Roman forces for years, and at the start of the film perform a deadly raid on the camp of Quintus Dias (Inglourious Basterds’ Michael Fassbender), a Roman centurion who is taken prisoner and tortured. Soon he escapes, off-camera for some reason, and meets up with General Virilus (“The Wire’s” Dominic West), who has orders to destroy The Picts once and for all. But Virilus is betrayed by his Pict guide Etain (Quantum of Solace’s Olga Kurylenko), who was once brutalized by the Romans and had her tongue cut out. Now, the few remaining survivors of the legion are running for their lives from an army of merciless killers in a desperate attempt to return home.
Michael Fassbender: Putting the “centur” back in “centurion.”
(Look, coming up with captions is hard, okay?)
Frankly, that’s a messy set-up for an otherwise simple “Odyssey”-esque storyline. There’s little significance to Quintus Dias’ abduction at the start of the film. He doesn’t gain any knowledge of particular use, nor is he turned against his own kind by the enemy, making one wonder why it was necessary to include him there at all. For the sake of the narrative it would have been just as easy to include him in Virilus’ legion from the beginning. Similarly clunky: The tragic tale of Etain is known to the Romans, which raises the question of why they would place any faith in her in the first place. “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal,” if you will. But after an awkward introduction, Centurion moves at a brisk pace, doesn’t shy away from a healthy R-Rating, and although all isn’t exactly forgiven it’s appreciated for what it is: a good B-Movie deep inside A-Movie trappings.
Centurion is the kind of historical movie that’s more epic in concept than actual scope. There are a few large scale battles but most of the film features the same half dozen characters running around the woods, so the scale feels off. It’s an intimate film that toys with vastness, to its own detriment, since the big action sequences are never big enough to carry a film based on spectacle alone, and the characters are mostly stock figures. Fassbender makes the most of his dashing leading man role, and “The Wire’s” Dominic West does a lot with fairly little screen time, but I saw the film a few weeks ago now and the majority of the cast has already glommed together in my mind as a notion, rather than an ensemble. At worst they feel like cannon fodder. At best they’re familiar tropes, betraying each other or learning not to judge foreigners too harshly depending on the needs of the scene. Olga Kurylenko cuts a very striking figure as the film’s main villain: She’s beautiful without ever sacrificing her threatening presence. But her character is so much like Mogwa from The Last of the Mohicans that she never comes into her own as a truly impressive villain. And how did she tell everyone her elaborate backstory with her tongue cut out anyway? Find out the answer now in our Geekscape Interview!
Yes. I’m wearing a Centurion helmet. I blame Jonathan.
Centurion is a smaller movie than you might think, and as such will probably find a bigger audience at home than in theaters, which is why it’s so appropriate that it’s being released on VOD, VUDU, Playstation Network, Xbox Marketplace and Amazon this July 30th, well in advance of its theatrical release on August 27th. In the comfort of one’s own home, where the grandness of a theatrical viewing environment won’t dwarf the film, Centurion is highly recommended as a fast-paced, blood-soaked adventure for action fans everywhere. No more, unfortunately… but not the tiniest bit less.
“And this is for…!”
“Olga, you can’t talk.”
“Oh, god damn it!”
“Shhhhh…!”
Centurion, written & directed by Neil Marshall, starring Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Dominic West, Imogen Poots, Noel Clarke, David Morissey and Axelle Carolyn opens in theaters August 27, 2010. It will also be available on VOD, VUDU, Playstation Network, Xbox Marketplace and Amazon on July 30th.
