Right, here goes.
I can't really do the review in the previous format, because Centurion is not as bloody stupid a movie as the Eagle is. It is by no means smart, but not stupid either. You may or may not have noticed but in my Eagle text I'm not really deriding historical inconsistencies, I'm picking of internal nonsense, on stupidity of the movie itself. I don't care if pilum is shaped like a real one, it can be pink with green leaves attached for all I care, but if soldiers have pila they should use it for something else than showing off. So I won't be picking on Centurion for the ubiquitous bracers, some stupid helmets and so on. The kit the soldiers have they pretty much use.
As an aside - is the movie so blue because blue colour makes plastic armour look like metal (sorta, kinda, not really)? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy metal deepeeka segs? The plastics must have cost a fortune... Is it "elf'n'safety" at work?
1. Gray Hair must die! (or The Battle)
Much has been said about the battle here. Stupid, OK, I don't care. Ambushes did happen despite best efforts of the ambushed. What I really didn't like:
- It's basically the ambush scene from The Last of the Mohicans. Unlike Eagle the Centurion does not feature Magua, but references the same movie. And while redcoats forming in ranks and firing at the forest had some sense, legionaries trying to "hold the line!!!" against rolling fireballs... What would be the point? Some demonstration of manliness? After this it becomes worse, because:
- The battle is boring! Seriously, stupid or not stupid, it is just boring. The entire scene is:
SSHHHING!
AAAARGH
and this times 50. Some stupid amount of THE SAME FREAKING SCENE of superwarrior stabbing a soldier with a sword (sshhhhing!). The same scene! Fifty times! When it was enjoyable the first 0 times. This entire battle could have been shot with 4 actors. All those extras, the terrain, all wasted. SSHHING! AAAARGH! Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, oh Gawd, make it stop!
And then the legionaries die, the Picts not giving a damn about policing the battlefield depart and the Special Forces form. Once they have this burdensome army out of the way they can get to serious ass kicking.
- This battle removes from the movie one of the two characters I cared about. The guy who played Russel Crowe. The soldier's soldier, stereotypical so much it hurt, but he did pull it off and he was actually enjoyable to watch. He is then replaced by some Jesus in Chains (well, chainmail), teflon-smooth, ideal, boring as hell.
2. The newly formed Spec Ops team starts the ninja stuff. The team is formed and everyone (or was it later?) introduces themselves.
- Hello, I'm Stereotype A
- And I'm stereotype B
- I'm the Token Black Guy
And so on. In itself it's not bad. Stereotypical teams can be well put together and enjoyable. Vide Blade II, a stupid movie with a highly stereotype-heavy team that was still fun. This one is just dry, as if the director felt the character building was done by the introduction itself and now we could get to the ninja stuff.
3. Ninja stuff.
Yaaaaaaawn.
4. They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!
They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!
So they run. And run. There is some plan and they run. The plan becomes obsolete the moment the Russian chick joins the hunt, but this will not stand in the way of rehashing LotR scenes. At this moment I was packing my gear for a training and couldn't be much bothered to look at the screen. Yes, yes, I saw it all before, but Mortensen can actually act.
5. Party exchange.
The Romans decide to raid the enemy camp. Just two of them. Why two? What were the others supposed to guard? They didn't have a bloody thing. Why didn't they stash the wounded guy somewhere and all go? What were those two expecting to achieve against 8 or something? If they were this good why didn't they... ah, fuck it.
The Picts do the same, there's some killing on both sides of the river and logically the Romans win. Why? Because the Picts didn't take their horses on the raid. They left them with guards just killed by the Romans. The Romans now have horses! They can just take them and have mounts for themselves and to spare, they can be back in their own lines in a day or two! Ah, sod it, they go back on foot. Not even killing the horses to make it harder for the enemy. In their own camp they find the wounded guy. The Picts "left him to bleed" in spite of the Russian chick having orders to bring back heads. So they run again.
6. The scene in the hut with the clean chick. It is fairly enjoyable, but just... it doesn't have a role in this movie. It's a bit random, like a space filler. "Guys, we have to do something with 15mins". It doesn't mean a lot, it doesn't lead to anything, it's just coasting on idle, waiting for the final fight. Oh, and telling us the Romans are good and the Russian chick is bad.
7. The bad guy shows he's bad. So why was he willing to risk his life for Russel Crowe guy before? He wasn't bad then? Ah, crap, I blame permissive society. Oh, and we are shown we were Totally Wrong About The Black Guy and It Was Just A Stereotype. Kids, I hope you all Learned An Important Lesson Today.
8. The final fight.
I sort of enjoyed it. It made me stop packing my clothes for a moment. Not much to say.
9. The end.
Oh, wow, I was TOTALLY not expecting that!
Sorry, I was. Really.
All in all it is hard to write about this movie because it is so bland. There's not a lot to sink your teeth into. It's one of the "watched without pain, won't watch again" things. Not as stupid as Eagle and able to show relationships between soldiers without pointless climbing the Brokebackus Mountain, not stupid, not smart, sort of non-stick surface. I paid 4GBP for the DVD, it's a fair price. The fact the movie is laden with stupid tropes (again, the camps are death traps, why did Romans build them?), strippers with swords (a well known fact - make a good looking girl strip and give her a weapon and she becomes unstoppable), some half-arsed moral case, some token bad guy who becomes bad suddenly and without any reason... all those tropes do not matter much. A good director can pull them off, make them work. Here they are a chain of stuff that just doesn't link together, the movie doesn't work, it's like disconnected heap of jigsaw puzzles.
There were two character I cared about. The Legate (the character who played Russel Crowe) and the Pict chief. Both decent actors, both suggested some depth to them, both were enjoyable to watch, both I'd like to see more of. Instead we get a Playboy model chasing some watered down Aragorn wannabe by sniffing his pants from 1000 metres.
Meh.
Ah, one last thing - what was the Big Evil Plan? The Russian chick was planted as a sleeper agent to lure a legion north? The Pict chief knew Rome would send a legion eventually? And how was the Russian chick supposed to achieve that? She was a dirty barbarian who couldn't speak! What did she do, point suggestively to the north and stroke the golden Eagle? And when she was reporting on Roman movements to her superiors was she making "uga! uga!" sounds ("1 legion, no scouts, 532m sou-by-sou-east")? Ah, no matter I guess
hock:
)AND since I AM in Legio IX, I wasn't gonna read it. I may now, thanks to the movie. It's like the new Sherlock Holmes flicks.. you have to suspend your historical knowledge. :-)
