ON THE SILVER SCREEN: "CENTURION" A BLOODY GOOD TIME AT THE MOVIES

By Brian Lafferty

September 6, 2010 (San Diego)--Neil Marshall is a British writer/director renowned for the amount of blood and gore he includes in his films. Sometimes he’s visceral as in Dog Soldiers. He can be gleeful and cartoonish about it like he was in Doomsday. In The Descent, the violence was unpleasant. In the case of Centurion, he is gritty and realistic. Even if it appeared gratuitous, I didn’t mind because I had a lot of fun watching it.

Centurion depicts a game of cat and mouse between Roman soldiers and the Pichts. The Pichts were people victimized by the conquest and imperialism of the Romans. They plan on exacting revenge by torturing and killing several centurions who happen to be innocent scapegoats, the pawn in a larger scheme. They escape the clutches of their brutal captors (one of whom is an expert at martial arts and sniffing out human prey; she’s played by Olga Kurylenko) and are chased all the way back to Rome.

Structurally speaking, it is a standard chase movie but I still found myself drawn into it. The line between good guys and bad guys is consistently blurred. The captured centurions are actually innocent except for the one rotten Roman who kills a child. The Pichts were victimized by the Romans. They had Kurylenko’s tongue cut off so she wouldn’t speak ill of them and watched in horror as her mother was raped so viciously and repeatedly that she wanted to die. This at first makes the Pichts justified in their hunting down their captured but at the same time it’s hard to side with them because they are so brutal. They are angry but in the end they are no better than their counterparts.

The movie includes another theme present in Marshall’s body of work and that is survival. Like his previous movies, the characters will do anything to stay alive. The men resort to disemboweling an elk (I think that’s what it is, at least it looks like one) and eating its half-digested stomach contents. Later, when two of them are chased by a pack of wolves, one of them disables the other so that he won’t hold him back, then leaves him to perish.

The film is violent but not as blood-soaked as his previous work. There are plenty of throats slashed. Heads are lopped off, arrows are fired into people’s faces and eyes, and hatchets are jammed into faces and necks. It looks mostly computer generated and the movie’s more violent shots are seen very quickly instead of lingering and wallowing in admiration.

The at-times anachronistic dialogue is the weakest part of the movie. It’s a minor quibble but I doubt people back then used such phrases as “get laid” or such profanity as the s-word or the f-word. Perhaps in a 1980s British special effects-laden fantasy it would be a good device but here the characters’ modern-day speech took me out of the moment.

Nevertheless, Centurion is an intriguing work. It is easy to shrug it off if you don’t look at the little things. Neil Marshall is at his best when violence is a part of the story, not the dominating force. Dog Soldiers and the first half of The Descent are proof. By focusing less on the violence and more on the characters, their survival, and the dichotomy between the Romans and the Pichts, he makes what could have been a standard chase movie into something more effectual.