Centurion movie review & film summary (2010)

Most of the characters are so characterless that you can't tell who they are when they get impaled or beheaded, and you can't remember who they used to be after they're dispatched. Not that it matters. This leaves plenty of time for staring at spectacularly craggy landscapes in white, gray, blue and green, relieved by lovely splashes of bright red during the fighting and torture scenes, of which there are too few.

Perhaps you're not used to thinking of imploding and exploding brain matter, flayed torsos and severed limbs in terms of abstract aesthetic beauty. Well, think again. Writer-director Neil Marshall (whose "The Descent" is one of the finest, most harrowing horror films of the new century) shoots his head-to-head (or axe-to-head) combat violence in jittery Strobo-Vision, a technique that paradoxically makes the explicit carnage look less realistic and more like cartoony "Evil Dead" splatter. The eruptions of red serve as welcome compositional elements, providing the only vibrant color from the warm part of the spectrum. Never mind who's getting slaughtered, that red is gore-geous.

The film starts with a long, CGI-assisted helicopter shot through the opening credits that takes us deep into the remote mountainous reaches of the Roman Empire in Northern Britain, where we encounter centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender, of "Hunger"), a scarlet slash across his bare chest, fleeing unseen predators and tumbling through the snowfields. As narrator, he introduces himself and tells us that "this is neither the beginning nor the end of my story." Sure enough, 15 minutes later, we've circled back to this same moment in the narrative, and the movie isn't yet over by a long shot.

What happens before and (mostly) after this is that the Ninth Legion, under the command of lusty Gen. Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West, immortal as McNulty on "The Wire"), is sent on a mission that goes disastrously wrong when the imperial forces are beset by Pictish fireballs.

For the rest of the film, the aforementioned bedraggled handful of Roman survivors are stalked over mountain and dale by a murderous band of dogged Picts, which becomes the occasion for some jokey "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" references about cliffs and posses. Also featured is a feral mute she-wolf huntress named Etain ("Quantum of Solace" Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), whose tracking savvy is surpassed only by her fierce appetite for turning Romans into ragù.