Centurion is the first of two films out this year taking is their premise the mysterious disappearance of the Ninth Legion in Scotland in the early part of the second century. The other is Kevin Macdonald's Eagle of the Ninth due later in the year. The fact that the 'disappearance' of the Ninth was probably down to a bureaucratic blunder rather than wholesale carnage doesn't seem to make a difference here.
The film is an unlikely choice for Neil Marshall on the back of cracking genre films such as Dog Soldiers and The Descent; however once you get into it the choice turns out not to be so surprising after all.
The period and location give Marshall another opportunity to do what he does best which is essentially a tense drama about a group of people banding together against an implacable enemy. In this case the small group is the remainder of the Ninth Legion - destroyed in a sequence of spectacular carnage - and the implacable foe are the Picts who are hunting them down. Apart from the setting it could just as easily pass as a Western in terms of its genre components.
The motley bunch feature some stirring performances especially from Michael Fassbender in the title role and the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman army is an opportunity to provide roles for Noel Clarke and Riz Ahmed; not the sort of actors you would rush to cast in a historical epic. Historically the film is a joke for reasons too many and tedious to go into here but Marshall's fans don't want historical accuracy.
What they want is gore and he delivers by the blood-filled bucket. All arrow strikes have to puncture eyes or heads; all sword strokes have to sever limbs, all spear thrusts have to transfix the victim, any blow to the head must result in decapitation and so on. Filmed in glorious HD it certainly makes for a very effective piece of genre cinema, if a little relentless.
One thing that does puzzle me are the ' fly through' titles and the extensive use of helicopter shots. I get the sense that someone somewhere might have thought about converting this to 3D but perhaps had a change of heart. Or it may just be that the possibility of an audience becoming used to 3D means directors are changing their visual thinking; either way it is not a welcome development.
1 comment:
Having seen this now, I really enjoyed it (though I had to sit on the edge of my seat through the ending since I had class to get to).
The titles were a funny choice: they looked poorly bitmapped, and the weird wood texture didn't gel with the craggy landscapes behind it at all. I'm glad it wasn't done in 3D (or fake 3D, at least) but I wish they could have done better titles. Even cheaper titles would have looked better than those, and with them being the first thing you see of the film, it doesn't launch it on a strong point.
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