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.
