Written and Directed by Neil Marshall
CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS
Nasty, brutish and (at 90 minutes) short. This film has an extremely high blood, gore and severed body parts count. The advances in SFX technology means you can have heads sliced off to camera with blood spurting everywhere, and the SFX required gets heavily used.
Centurion is set on the Scottish borders in 117 AD, just as the Romans are about to build Hadrian’s wall. The Romans have forts on the north side and still plan to extend the empire. The Picts prove intractable and this is the story of why the Romans decided enough is enough and built the wall. It’s a British film, so you get the impression there’s been major attention to historical detail, and there’s no Hollywood matching tartans and skirling bagpipes for the Picts. Instead they’re dressed in generic 2nd century Barbarian.
The Encylopedia Brittannica has only about an inch of text on the Picts. In a nod to Mel Gibson’s forays into Aramaic and ancient Mayan, the Picts in the film speak in Pictish, a language that died in the 9th century so thoroughly that no one seems sure whether it was related to Gaelic or not. This means they converse in guttural grunts, which sound pretty much like I’d imagine Pictish to be. Unfortunately, this involves subtitles, and the subtitles are the most misguided I’ve ever seen. They’re in a fancy all-capitals font, and are therefore near illegible. Pictish fares better than English (which stands in for Latin) though, because the dialogue is dreadful throughout.
Picts ‘n’ Scots / Jocks ‘n’ Geordies?
In most people’s minds Picts ‘n’ Scots go together like bread ‘n’ butter or fish ‘n’ chips. They always appeared together, like the Jocks ‘n’ Geordies in the Dandy comic. I assumed that as the border was an artificial one, and that the people on both sides were much of a muchness, and guessed the Picts were more southerly than the Scots. Not so. They were the Eastern people of Scotland, though apparently ‘Pict’ was also a disparaging Roman name for anyone living north of the wall.
George MacDonald Fraser’s two novels set on The Borders in the 16th century, plus The Steel Bonnets, his exhaustive history of The Borders in that era confirm the view that The Borders were one distinct region with a political border slicing across the middle. That explains something. The film starts out with a Pictish attack on the Roman fort, killing everyone except our hero, The Centurion (Michael Fassbender). The Picts attack the fort naked to the waist in freezing weather. All visitors to Newcastle in winter note the habit of the youth in walking around in thin shirts and blouses in the coldest weather, eschewing jackets or overcoats. These Geordies are proud descendants of The Picts.
So our Centurion legs it to York to report the loss. Southerners like me are always amazed to find that when you’ve driven from the south coast to York, you only seem to be about halfway to the Scottish border, so it’s a fair old trek. In York he meets The General (Dominic West), and the 9th legion sets off to destroy the Picts and establish a bit of Roman law and order. They’re led by an attractive female Pict tracker (Olga Kurylenko), who will betray them. There’s an ambush, the Picts resorting to Great Balls of Fire (I joke not) to destroy the legion’s serried ranks. According to the film publicity the legion were ‘decimated’. No, that means 10% were killed. In this case, around 99% end up on the ground with missing bits and buckets of blood all over them.
Oh, shit! Michael Fassbender surveys the remains of the 9th Legion
The survivors then try to rescue the captured general and make their way back to the border. The tracker, whose name might be something like Grunt Grunt, assists the Pictish King, Grunt Grunt Grunt, in finding and slaughtering them. In the process, one of the Romans kills Grunt, the son of Grunt Grunt Grunt, giving the king motivation (if he needed it) to step up the slaughtering intent. To me, Grunt Grunt Grunt looks the sort of fellow to slaughter you on a whim for fun. All these people have character names listed on the Internet Movie Database, but I didn’t pick any up from the movie.
Dominic West, the General, in captivity
Grunt Grunt, our female tracker has multiple layers of motivation having seen her parents murdered and raped by the Romans (the film isn’t clear on the order there), then having been raped herself and having had her tongue cut out so she couldn’t tell anyone at all. Anyway, she tells her fellow Picts, and devotes her life to worming her way into the Roman army’s trust. So once they’ve finished incinerating Grunt’s body, the Picts decide to get REALLY heavy and apply some warpaint. Or woad as it was known. Roman historians noted that the Picts wandered around caked in woad. Possibly a layer of blue mud provided protection from the elements. That’s why they were called Picts meaning ‘painted people.’ However, the gorgeous Grunt Grunt, applies a few tentative and artistic dabs of blue to her fine cheekbones rather than cakes her face in slap.
Grunt Grunt with skilfully-applied woad (Olga Kurylenko)
So the cohort are off through the wild hills pursued by relentless Pictish pursuers. They are saved at a crucial point by a Pictish necromancer, played by Imogen Poots (who starred in the 2010 remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire). She has been thrown out by the tribe for necromancy and perhaps aversion to woad. Her name, Arianne, might not have been sufficiently gutteral too.
Arianne’s her name, necromancing’s her game (Imogen Poots)
One by one the Romans are picked off or die horribly. This gets confusing as they long ago abandoned their Roman armour so are dressed in generic barbarian garb themselves. It’s a bit hard to see who’s killing who, and in the fight in an abandoned Roman fort, one guy is apparently murdered horribly several times.
Anyway, most of the cast end up dead. The Romans prove to be as nasty and brutish as the Picts. There is a happy(ish) ending.
Great review – seems as good as ‘Gladiator’, which I confess, I missed why all the raving was about. I suspect that it predates the idea of guerilla warfare by about 14 centuries (also see that fine historian Mel Gibson’s effort on the American War of Independence, which posits the Americans winning through tactics learned from the French Resistance of 1941-1945 and the Viet Cong, 1947-1972).
I also highly doubt professional soldiers would abandon their armour, especially given the climate (both actual and emotional.)
Sounds like the producers should have read a little of Fraser, or even Norman Davies, whose history of the Isles is very decent, indeed.
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Then there’s Robin Hood (2010 version) where the French land on the beaches in wooden replicas of 1944 landing craft. The beaches they land on are supposed to be Dungeness, famous for its flatness, but they’re repelled by the English descending from the mountains of Kent.
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Lest you think the casting aside of Roman armour was unexplained (and inexplicable) it was done to enable them to blend in with the locals and look Pictish. That’s in spite of their absence of pigtails, bare chests, woad and axes, as well as speaking only Latin and one of the cohort being of African origin.
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When the Romans invaded Britain they met a lot of resistance in the form of guerilla warfare, regardless of how many centuries it took for someone to call it that.
Unsurprisingly, when you’re faced with a bunch of invaders who are better trained and better armored, hiding in the woods you grew up in to lob spears unseen is a good tactic, as well as leading Roman pursuers into bogs and the like.
No great balls of fire though.
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Enjoyed the review. I really enjoy visiting Pictish sites in Scotland and looking at the stones. The problem is that there is no written documents preserved, but the museum at Meigle is worth a google. I think from memory that the Picts were absorbed, into the Vikings and a westward spread of Gaels. Antonine’s wall was the first attempt by the Romans to set a Northern limit on the Roman empire, but they could not hold it and retreated to Hadrian’s Wall.
I think the stimulus for the film comes from Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth, but I think we’ll never know if a Roman legion was lost in Scotland or not, but it always seems to be very popular story in Scotland. So forewarned, I’ll watch the film.
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Should have read ‘…but it is often assumed to have happened up here. It always seems to…’
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“1.
kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of.
”
stop being so arrogant. above is a meaning of “decimated”
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Suki, I think you mean “pedantic” rather than “arrogant.” You don’t know whether I’m arrogant or not, though it was a pedantic comment, and I normally dislike those rush of pedantic English guides myself … incidentally, they all pounce on “decimated’ as wrongly used in the definition you quote. But I agree the wider meaning has developed into meaning “a large percentage of,” but this context is a Roman legion, which takes us straight to the origin of “decimated” which was “reduced by 10%’ because the word originates with Roman legions. This is one context where a humorous review, which this is, is entitled to be pedantic … especially as the “large percentage” is just about everyone.
On “decimated” a series of radio interviews last week had social workers commenting on the Rotherham child abuse cases, and the effects on the victims. Quotes included “She’s been totally decimated by it,” “So many kids feel decimated” and those examples cross the line between “widened use of a word” (which I accept) into “semi-literate speakers.” I think in both cases, the social workers speaking meant “devastated.”
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