With a Lance and a Musket and a Roman Spear

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Neil Marshall is a director who seems desperate to hold on to his cult. In his quest to become…I don’t know…the next John Carpenter(?) he has a tendency to slide back two steps for every three he’s gained, and as an intermittent fan of Marshall’s (at this point, I don’t think anyone is more than an intermittent fan, but then again we’re only four films in – the day is young) I’m becoming a bit frustrated. Marshall refuses to take off -- in that he's not using them as a springboard -- completely from his past successes, but, still, at least he is taking off -- in the sense that he's leaving them in his rearview -- from his past failures.
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It all began with 2002’s Dog Soldiers, Marshall’s on-the-cheap werewolves vs. the Army film, which was considered good enough by some to get this whole cult business going. I wasn’t on board, myself, though at this point I don’t remember the movie well enough to offer up any kind of strong objections (the fact that Dog Soldiers has almost completely fled my memory might be considered damning enough, if I wasn’t the one saying it, because my memory’s shot). But next up, Marshall offered the world The Descent, a highly effective, at times even torturous, in the good sense, horror film about caves, female spelunkers, and blind, shrieking, underground monsters. It’s an excellent film, about which I won’t say too much at this time – for now it’s enough to note that the Marshall cult was ready to get this show on the road, and that Marshall seemed perfectly willing to lay his cinematic influences bare, in The Descent quoting liberally from, for instance, Kubrick’s The Shining, among others. This was all fine by us, until Doomsday, Marshall’s next film, came along, and struck the world as basically Escape from New York and The Road Warrior, but bad. Not terrible, and in fact, for my money, sort of fun, but about as empty as such fun can be. Doomsday’s debt to The Road Warrior is especially immense, to the point where you can’t say, as you could with The Descent, that Marshall was quoting his influences – this was plagiarism.
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Needless to say, the Marshall cult began to lose a lot of its verve and enthusiasm at around this point. When the object of a cult begins, with only his third film, to flaunt his lack of creativity and show signs that he is not, in fact, in the filmmaking business, but rather the recycling business, the acolytes tend to start standing around, scratching their necks and kicking the dirt, filled with a dread that this may not have been such a hot idea after all. Such doubts tend to be fleeting, however, and why shouldn’t they be? At worst, Doomsday and The Descent cancel each other out (Dog Soldiers counting as sort of an introduction, an announcement of potential, more than anything else), and there’s no reason to not hold out hope for Marshall’s next film. Maybe if he could come up with a movie title that began with a letter other than D, he’d really be on to something.

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Which brings us to Centurion (that’s a C! Which is only one letter back from D, but that’s okay, you don’t have to be a world-beater every time). And we’re left with what? Well, I’ll tell you: it’s better than Doomsday, not least because, as far as I can tell, it’s a whole hell of a lot less derivative. The story, briefly, is about Quintos Dias (an excellent Michael Fassbender), a former gladiator and now Roman soldier, who is stationed in Britain, which he and all the other Romans are trying to conquer. (Let's get this out of the way: if you go to Centurion expecting or hoping to see parallels with current events, you will find them. However, you might have a more difficult time trying to make the film conform to whatever your own politics might happen to be. And I'm cool with that.) Dias's initial platoon, or whatever, gets massacred by the dreaded Picts, and Dias, because he can speak their language, is taken captive. He escapes, however, and is taken in by the Roman ninth infantry, led by General Virilus (Dominic West). Except they're also massacred, due to the double-dealings of a Pict tracker and double agent named Etain (Olga Kurylenko, whose make-up and costume as Etain causes her to bear more than a passing resemblence to Lee-Anne Liebenberg as Viper in Marshall's Doomsday; it's probably worth mentioning that Liebenberg was the most striking feature of that entire film), a now-tongueless victim of past Roman misdeeds whose head is filled with thoughts of vengeance. So Virilus is taken prisoner, and it turns out seven of his infantry survived the massacre, including Dias, and soon a rescue mission is under way, which goes badly, and soon we're in escape mode. It's all very effective and thrilling.

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It’s also very lean. One thing about all of Marshall’s non-Doomsday films is that they tell very simple stories, with Marshall focusing his energy on craft, mood, tension, and all that other stuff. Doomsday was too busy by half, and to give you an idea of how far on the other end of the scale Centurion can be located, consider that it’s a story about ancient Rome, honor, combat, betrayal (and I guess also identity, if you want to be one of those people), yet it clocks in at 97 minutes, with credits. When was the last time that happened? Such films tend to have a minimum run-time of two and half hours (incidentally, if lately I seem to be making a lot of the run-times of various films, that’s only because I believe that efficiency is an underrated quality). But Marshall gets all the same stuff in there as his swollen brethren do, and he doesn’t really short-change anything. What isn’t needed is gone. If, in short fiction, it’s vital that you don’t waste words, in filmmaking it’s often equally vital that you don’t waste seconds, and Marshall doesn’t.

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What Marshall also doesn't do, however, is good blood. And let's be honest: this is a blood movie. Like Braveheart and 300 before it, Centurion is a grand, blood-and-thunder, skull-crushing decapitation festival. It tells an interesting story, has swell acting, and all that, but its primary reason for being is to drench everyone in viscera. I don't know about you, but that's plenty okay with me -- the problem is that practical gore effects, of the kind used in Braveheart, seem to be going to the way of stop-motion animation, at least for now, and in Centurion what you see a lot of are swords and such arcing down into the unfortunate torso or head of a doomed Roman or Pict, and then a smear of what appeared to me to be MS Paint, red, on the spray-paint option. This is fairly distracting, and unnecessary, and all around a bad choice.

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But it's not ruinous. It's just a very strange blunder, one that, to me, kept 300 from ever achieving a level beyond "curiosity" (although that movie has a number of other issues) but here just keeps Centurion from being a slam-dunk, albeit one of modest ambitions. The film still represents Marshall back on solid ground, though; closer to the heights he reached with The Descent (pun!), still scrambling a bit to fully get back there, but comfortable at least with the fact that Doomsday is, for now, behind him.

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UPDATE: I just changed my first paragraph, as the early version made it sound as if I was getting ready to slam Centurion, which I don't do. It was a bad paragraph.