![]() ![]() Brought before Pict king Gorlacon, who has united the northern tribes, Dias is brutally interrogated, but escapes on foot.Ī messenger from the fort reaches Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Roman governor of Britannia, who hopes to obtain favour with the Roman Senate and transfer back to the comforts of Rome. At the Roman outpost of Pinnata Castra, Pict warriors led by Vortix and Aeron kill the entire garrison, taking only the second-in-command, Centurion Quintus Dias, because he can speak the Pictish language. ![]() The Picts engage in guerrilla warfare against the Romans along the Glenblocker forts and the Gask Ridge at the southern border of the Scottish Highlands. The Roman Empire has been unable to fully conquer Britain, reaching a harsh stalemate in the North. It received mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box office, only earning half of its $12 million budget. The film stars Michael Fassbender, Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko. Industry Rating: R for sequences of strong bloody violence, grisly images and language.Centurion is a 2010 British historical action- war film written and directed by Neil Marshall, loosely based on the disappearance of the Roman Empire's Ninth Legion in Caledonia in the early second century AD. But it’s a darned entertaining outing from a director who knows action, loves narration and doesn’t share Hollywood’s fear of period pieces that don’t involve Greek gods.Ĭast: Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Dominic West, David Morrissey You just know they’re going to have to leap off a cliff into a river, at some point. “Centurion” is a B-picture, predictable story arc and predictable action beats. The equally lovely Imogen Poots shows up as a woodlands exile who may be friend or foe to the fleeing soldiers. She grows into the part’s fierceness - eventually. One misstep in all this is the woodlands scout, played by Bond beauty Olga Kurylenko as all hair and eye shadow and editing that doesn’t cover her discomfort at all the horseback riding and brutal fighting of the early scenes. He pits the survivors against one another and against the elements, and pushes the surviving soldiers through the wilds of northern Britain (the wilds of Spain substituted for it) with a fury. Marshall fills the supporting cast with sturdy British character players - David Morrissey and Liam Cunningham among them. Writer-director Neil Marshall (“Doomsday, The Descent”) smartly anchored the film around Fassbender, who makes a fin hero. Quintus Dias must lead them back to the frontier to safety. We flash back to the ambushes that put Quintus on the run, the rough-and-tumble Ninth Legion, led by a two-fisted general played by Dominic West of “300.” The Roman governor ( Paul Freeman of “Raiders of the Last Ark) sends the troops out to “sow the Earth with our dead,” and sure enough, only a mismatched handful of the ambushed soldiers survived. Quintus Dias narrates that this has become “a new kind of war, a war without honor, without end.” Draw your own modern parallels here. And the Picts, the fierce people who hadn’t yet learned to distill Scotch whiskey, are after him. Michael Fassbender (“Inglourious Basterds”) stars as Quintus Dias, a soldier we meet on the run, through the snows of Northern Britain. Beautifully filmed, given a lyrical lilt by virtue of a poetic voice over narration and featuring the brutal, personal and graphic violence that is today’s cinematic style, it’s a B-movie with a hint of history to it. ![]() That’s the plot of “Centurion,” an old–fashioned quest epic set in Roman Britain. The “soldiers trapped behind enemy lines” story has been a favorite since Xenophon followed Greeks home from deep in hostile Persia in “Anabasis,” in 400 B.C. ![]()
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