centurion: titanic amongst the picts

SPOILER ALERT

Centurion is a madly disappointing action film inspired by the disappearance of the legendary Ninth Spanish Legion, a powerful armed command originally led by Julius Caesar himself which disappeared from history, swallowed up without a trace, ostensibly in the wildlands of Britain early in the 2nd century.

The Ninth has an almost unbelievable legacy, beginning with a brilliant run in Gaul, Hispania and Africa, after which Caesar disbanded them into retirement in 46 BC. After his murder, though, Octavian recalled them to duty and they fought beside him against Antony and his Egyptian Queen at the Battle of Actium. Skip ahead seventy years, and the Emperor Claudius sends them north as part of his bid to invade Britain. There they suffer a bad defeat in 61 AD during Boudica's uprising but are still there building a fortress at York in 71. And here they will stay, in what has to be one of the longer and more depressing postings in military history, for half a century. The city as we know it today, in fact, was built with their fortress at its heart. Petergate was one of its main thoroughfares; York Minster is built on the spot where the massive Roman Headquarters squatted.

We know the Legion is no longer in existence by 161 because Marcus Aurelius ordered a sort of official inventory of the Roman military and our boys are nowhere listed. Evidence as to their mysterious end is scant, compelling and contradictory: some theorize the Ninth wound up in Judea or Persia, but the most alluring myth, the one which will not release its grip on our collective cultural imagination, is that the nemesis of the Ninth was Britain itself, with its gloomy climes, untamed Picts, and Gordian Knot of tangled forest and swamplands.

The mystery has inspired other filmmakers and writers. A few years ago the Ninth made an appearance in a loose and fantastical restructuring of events called the Last Legion: with a great cast (John Hannah, Colin Firth, Kevin McKidd) and an engaging plotline describing the Roman origins of King Arthur, it's quality fare for kids but has nothing really to do with history.

As for Centurion, director Neil Marshall wrote the script, and that's always a warning sign. It flashes me back like a bad acid trip to that debacle of badly-written, masturbatory self-indulgence called Titanic (I spit the word; I do not speak it). And, although nowhere near as bad (what could be?), this one suffers from a similar inherent structural deformity, the Titanic Malady, if you will, which sets in when there's nobody standing by to tell the director/writer that his script is no damn good.

In the closing credits, Marshall thanks Walter Hill and Xenopohon for inspiration, implying that he was trying to make something like the Warriors, a comic book movie that Hill made in 1979, and one which has aged remarkably well. It takes Xenophon's Anabasis, one of the great adventure stories of all time, and resets it in a sort of timeless New York in which rival gangs divide the city. One gang, caught far behind enemy lines after a peace-conference gone horribly wrong, has to fight and sneak its way back to safety in its own territory. The result is golden, a classic for all time. Marshall takes the same story: the remnants of the Ninth are caught in wild Pictish territory, without weapons or hope and pursued by vengeance-driven berserker Picts (including one gorgeous, mute, woad-covered, unstoppable warrior-girl who was raped and mutilated in her childhood by Romans. She is unstoppable, that is, until she is inevitably stopped in that misogynist, Beautiful-Girl-Killed-In-Lingering-Swoony-Embrace shot that Hollywood loves so passionately). It's an adventure/fantasy, and therefore not much is to be expected of it, but even by those lowered expectations, the promised adventure never manifests into anything much.

First off, the lighting is wrong: flat, metallic light that looks nothing like anything I've ever seen in Britain. The colours are wrong. The film is full of good, very good and wonderful actors, all of them playing nobodies. They each have qualities which delineate them, one from another, but only in the broadest strokes, because character has been sacrificed to action, a choice which is only valid when well-executed, and this one is not. Michael Fassbender, a man so talent-crammed that I was beginning to fear him as a sort of demigod, fails here because he's playing a non-character who stands at the epicenter of a story peopled exclusively by non-characters. There is one powerful performance: Dominic West's. He busts the screen wide open with sheer strength of charisma as the well-loved and ill-fated Roman General Titus Flavius Virilus. Once he's dead, there's nothing but chase scenes, not very well filmed, and plot "twists" (they've lifted the Butch Cassidy cliff-jump scene straight, even down to the "Who ARE those guys?" brand of wonderments), not anything ingenious. The ethics are simple and never tested (do we desert the fellow who's too wounded to swim? Whoa! He got shot by the bad guys in the nick of time, so we don't have to explore our own moral ambiguity!), the good guys being unequivocally good and the bad guys cold and heartless. The violence is unrealistic; the sound is pumped way up and the cuts are, as usual these days, too quick to allow the fighting to feel life-like, which seems to be the point.

Because this is an adolescent boy fantasy, there is the de rigeur Beautiful Woman Living As Witch And Outcast across whom they stumble in the course of their wanderings. I understand the appeal of the trope, but I begin to long for a witch who is old, or homely, or lesbian, not spending her life waiting for this man, or at least not wearing lip-gloss. It is never fully explained, either, how Quintus Dias (Fassbender) knows how to speak flawless Pictish, or how the witchy-Pict girl knows how to speak flawless Latin (although she claims it's due to the proximity of the Roman fort, she also claims she keeps up the witchy facade to keep the Romans away, and that it's always worked). Dias was captured by the Picts, but apparently only for a week or so before he escaped, and I doubt anyone took the time to teach him his letters while he was chained to the rack. This is the kind of detail that clues you in to the fact that it's an adolescent fantasy instead of a true stab at bringing a particular time and place to life (as in, say, Jeremiah Johnson, in which language barriers are respected).

Since the thing is filmed with good to wonderful actors, and since only a single stab at humour comes off, I have to lay the fault at the editor's doorstep, after the scriptwriter takes a second drubbing, that is. (The only joke I remember working is when they make it at last to the Romans and one of the non-character soldiers says, "THIS is Hadrian's great plan? A WALL?")

Still, not to worry. There's another film in the works: the Eagle, due out this year and based on the classic novel the Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe which began the resurgence of the Legion's popularity. It'll have Jamie Bell and Mark Strong and will focus on a son of a legionnaire trying to solve the mystery and find the Ninth's totemic bronze eagle.