Also, I tend not to mind what accents Romans speak in since… well, they’d be speaking Latin. “Now she hunts Romans,” he remarks of a foe, before adding the redundant (but no less dramatic), “Now we are the prey.” When Fassbender’s character converses with the Picts, I was able to pick up some Gaelic in his dialogue, which perhaps explains why the Irish actor’s accent seems to slip a bit in those scenes, but he’s mostly really good. He wrestles with some of the movie’s rather purple prose, which sound like we should get a shot or two of his character making notes in a diary between combat scenes. Michael Fassbender is solid, even if he adheres to the rule which states that actors in Roman movies must have silly haircuts. ![]() As a result, the movie never has the chance to come off the rails, but it also doesn’t distinguish itself from its competition. This is undoubtedly a good thing, as it prevents the movie from ever becoming incredibly ridiculous (even as we watch Romans who look like they learnt combat from medieval movies rather than the Roman Empire’s military academy) – but it also makes everything seem oddly functional. While the threshold is certainly higher than one might expect in your traditional historical action picture, it never reaches the levels of absurdity one expects from Marshall. Still, there’s thrills and spills and a relatively large amount of violence and gore, as one might expect from Neil Marshall. Granted, one could argue that “group under siege” movies didn’t exist too much at the time of the Roman Empire, so they probably couldn’t spot the signs, but it’s all still very obvious. In particular, there are several betrayals which make the Roman Empire look like a bunch of fools. What follows is a fairly functional “group under siege” movie, populated with unsurprising little twists and turns. Surrounded by the enemy on all fronts, our heroes find themselves fighting not only for their Empire, but for their very lives. What we get is a functional little action movie, built around a bunch of Romans who end up leading a mission into Scotland that seems doomed to end in failure. A war without end.” Indeed, when the reason for the Pict’s hatred of the Ninth Legion is revealed, we discover that a member of the war party is guilty of what today would be considered a war crime. Using a rather obvious Iraqi war metaphor, we’re informed that the Picts are “using guerilla tactics and the landscape to their advantage”, being led by a man who was “a farmer until his wife was killed.” As the eponymous Centurion informs us, “This is a new kind of war. Like in Doomsday, the Scottish are portrayed as loud and aggressive, but here the movie hints that there are justifications. This time around, the portrayal of the barbarians to the North is even more sympathetic. In fact, that earlier movie opened when the English (now facing an infection all of their own) had to send a team up North to investigate why the Scots had proved too damn aggressive to allow themselves be destroyed by a mere apocalyptic disease. ![]() ![]() They didn’t die, and instead reverted to lawlessness, resenting any attempt by their Southern neighbours to reassert their rule. Indeed, Marshall’s earlier post-apocalyptic action fest feature a latter-day Hadrian’s Wall built to keep the Scottish out of England, leaving them to die of some random plague. It’s interesting how the theme of Scottish nationalism expresses itself in Marshall’s work, both here and Doomsday. Of course, the explanation favoured among historians today suggests that perhaps the fighting force was just disbanded and reassigned, but that wouldn’t make for an exciting little Neil Marshall film, would it? ![]() The movie deals with the same events roughly covered by The Eagle – the “mysterious” disappearance of the Roman Ninth Legion in 108/9 A.D., following the popular theory that the legion got itself into a bit of bother trying to tackle the Picts up in Scotland.
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