Description

Set during the 2nd-century Roman conquest of Britain, Neil Marshall’s CENTURION is a muscular bloodbath of a war film that lacerates with sledgehammer force. Hell is set in motion when Roman Centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) leads a pack of soldiers on a raid of a Pict tribesmen’s camp to rescue a captive general (Dominic West). During the raid, the Pict leader’s son is slaughtered, the consequences of which will be more severe than anything the Romans have ever encountered. They will face days of pure terror as a relentless army of Pict warriors hunt them from every angle across the hazy forests of Scotland, coming at them with blades, fire, arrows, teeth and claws. Their number slashed to seven, these usually fearless soldiers of the most powerful army in the world find themselves helpless and horrified, fighting for their lives against vicious, unstoppable attackers.

Goddamn. Whether or not you’ve got any interest in medieval battlefield epics will have no bearing on how much you’re going to love CENTURION. Its effects designer refers to it as “a Roman DIE HARD.” Its producer likens it to character-driven chase films like SOUTHERN COMFORT and APOCALYPTO. Marshall himself agrees with that, while also seeing it as homage of sorts to the classic cavalry Westerns of John Ford. “Somebody told me about the legend of the Ninth Legion, about this Roman legion that marched into the mists of Scotland and vanished without a trace—leaving this great mystery,” the filmmaker recently said. “This idea of an entire Roman army marching into Scotland and just vanishing, it immediately conjures up images of supernatural elements. But I didn’t really want to go down that road. I wanted to find out what might have actually happened, if they did disappear.” Just the same, CENTURION pulsates with the unmistakable tone of a horror film. Marshall’s access to big-budget financing has allowed him to make the most epic film of his career, staging the kinds of gripping action set pieces he’s so gifted at on a larger, bloodier, more spectacular scale than ever before, while keeping the human element fiercely intact. It may strike you as what you’d get had the maker of THE DESCENT directed GLADIATOR, being a blood-and-thunder spectacle film full of enormous sequences staged across magnificent landscapes, yet the story is intimate, the tension is nail-shredding and the overall atmosphere is one of an almost claustrophobic dread. It will leave you as breathless as the dead that fill its frames

—Mitch Davis