Film: Centurion

Centurion (Dir: Neil Marshall, 2010, UK, 97 min)

Screened at the 2010 Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Stuck at "the asshole of the world" — the Hibernean frontier of the Roman Empire — the homesick troops are almost as unhappy with their presence there as are the locals, who have kept up a twenty-year low-intensity campaign of guerrilla warfare. Trying to break the stalemate, the Governor sends in General Titus Virilus (Dominic West) to capture the Pict King. Led by the mysterious Etain (Olga Kurylenko), en route the Legion rescues Centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), sole survivor of a forward post overrun by the Picts.

Filled with some decent-enough slash-and-gouge set-pieces (billowing CGI blood a-plenty, if you like that sort of thing), director/screenwriter Neil Marshall has pared down the Roman Imperial Adventure Epic to something a bit more manageable. Without computer-enhanced, screen-filling armies, the Ninth legion looks like a realistic frontier fighting force — formidable, but not impregnable, especially up against an enemy that won't fight face-to-face in the gentlemanly way. The movie has that going for it, plus some winning big-screen vistas of the rugged, mountainous terrain.

But in terms of plot and characters the movie falters badly. By about the midway point, the film has basically devolved into an old Western, as if someone had search-and-replaced "Comanches" with "Picts" and pretty much let it go at that ("they hardly eat, they barely sleep... they will track you forever until they find you!").

In fact, the mute tracker Etain, foremost of the Picts in the film, might as well be wearing a cardboard sign around her neck reading "The Other", as she is the most animalistic of what is shown to be a dirty, unkempt paganistic tribe up against the shiny, rational Romans.¹ Granted, the Roman characters aren't particularly well-rounded, either. With the exception of West's General Virilus (a soldier's soldier who arm-wrestles and drinks amongst his loyal grunts), no one else makes much of an impact. Fassbender's Centurion Dias — who we spend the most time with — is a bit of a wet blanket, espousing some platitudes about honour and so on, but not much else. Even the winsome Arianne (Imogen Poots), who we encounter later on in the movie doesn't come off as much more than a set of pillowy lips and gorgeous eyes, despite her presentation as a sort of proto-feminist freethinking witchy woman.

So: some nice countryside shots, some okay hack-and-slash, cardboard characters and a kludge-y plot flavoured up with some unnecessary voice-overs. Not an unmitigated failure of a movie, but really nothing special. Marshall, who showed so much promise with his imaginative first two features (Dog Soldiers, The Descent) hasn't proven here that he has the ideas to breathe life into a bigger-scaled feature. This seems fated for direct-to-DVD release in North America, but I wouldn't say this is one of those cases where a worthy film is slipping through the cracks.

Preceded by: the twelve-minute Sock Tease (Dir: Aaron Kopff), part of the series of all-Canadian shorts running before features at the fest. Goodness... what to say here? Sort of an after-school special ("Dad... how can I tell if she really likes me?") with a sock puppet as the main character. It gets weirder. Possibly destined for cult status.

---

¹ Not that the Romans aren't also shown as cruel tormentors, as well. But while the Picts are presented here as something more that brutal savages, you'd think that the last century of anti-imperial/anticolonialist thought — or even an Asterix comic — might be grounds for a more nuanced view.