Out of Frame: Centurion
Your average swords-and-sandals battle film is a huge, big-budget undertaking. All those extras, costumes, props, coordination, and, in the modern age, digital post-production. Writer/director Neil Marshall's Centurion -- set in the second century A.D., as the Roman empire attempted to conquer the northernmost reaches of Great Britain, running into fierce opposition from the Pictish peoples who then populated the region -- doesn't skimp on the action or the bloody battles. But Marshall managed to make it for a fraction of the cost of overblown epics such as 300 and Gladiator by dialing down the scope and telling a smaller story, which works to the film's benefit in ways far more important than the financiers' bottom lines.
300 is the more appropriate reference point here. This is the film it could have been had it not been beholden to Frank Miller's weirdly mutated version of the Battle of Thermopylae and Zack Snyder's signature over-stylization and fetishistic attachment to slow-motion violence. Marshall's film drops the laughable macho melodrama ("This!...Is!...Sparta!") for an approach that, while not necessarily realistic, is at least more firmly tethered to the ground.
The film is the story of Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender, continuing to demonstrate his ability to make nearly any movie better by his mere presence), a Roman Centurion whose battalion is raided by the Picts, who continually confound the organized Roman forces with their guerrilla tactics. He's taken prisoner, but he escapes half-naked into the snow, and when reunited with the front, he heads almost immediately back into the fray under the bloodthirsty General Titus Flavius Virilus (The Wire's Dominic West). They take with them an intense Celtic warrior, Etain (Olga Kurylenko) as a tracker and a guide. As it turns out, she was brutalized by the Romans in her youth, and is only too willing to double-cross them. It's one of the weaker plot points: from the moment she's introduced, it's pretty obvious she's going to turn on the legion, and there's really little justification given for why the Romans should trust her so completely.
Meticulous plotting isn't necessarily the highest priority here, though. Marshall's film has a good helping of subtle smarts, but he is more concerned through most of the running time with carnage and bloody thrills. Roman history buffs looking for the finer points of the Empire's campaign in Great Britain may find this a little gory for their tastes.
Or, make that a lot. Considering the ease with which limbs and heads are lopped off, one would think the human body doesn't have them securely attached. Blood (most of it rendered practically rather than the unconvincing digital stuff) pours and splatters at inhuman rates, as if we're just big, people-shaped balloons full to bursting with gallons of bright red fluid. One might mistake this for a Machete-style exploitation homage, were the production values not so high.
Because on the flipside of all that gore, Marshall's film is also a starkly gorgeous and distinctive visual experience: He conveys the raw, biting cold of the rugged, forbidding landscapes of what is now northeastern Scotland by draining much of the color out of the images. All that's left is a nearly monochromatic palette of bluish gun-metal greys contrasted with the bright red blood.
Marshall continues to display an ability absent in most modern filmmakers who draw from the horror-movie toolbox to subtly work interesting social and political commentary into his work -- it's particularly evident in the female empowerment undercurrent of The Descent, which remains his best film. Here, it occurs to one at some point in the third act that it's odd that he's setting up the Romans as heroes in this story, particularly in the personal conflict between Quintus and Etain, the latter of whom has every right to desire bloody revenge on the Romans.
But through a deftly executed bit of plotting at the end, Marshall shows that the sides aren't quite as clear cut as we might think of them. In doing so, he makes the 2nd century suddenly analogous the 21st, and makes perhaps the strongest anti-war case ever made in a movie this gratuitously violent.
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Centurion
Written and Directed by Neil Marshall
Starring Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Dominic West, Imogen Poots
Running time: 97 minutes
Rated R for sequences of strong bloody violence, grisly images and language.
Opens today at E Street.
View the trailer.