Centurion feels like a rough draft of a Gladiator knockoff that couldn’t manage to inspire the budget for a trendy 2010’s 3D treatment. And yes, I know that this movie takes place approximately 70 years before the events in Gladiator, but I bring it up because you can 100% tell that the team behind this was targeting the same crowd.
To bring up another over-the-top historical battle film, this movie also seemed to be attempting to out-pace Zack Snyder’s 300 in terms of sheer CGI blood spray count. The tone is set early on, with the very first on-screen kill occurring when a guard taking a leak off the side of the fort he’s manning gets suddenly speared right in the dick. As you might be able to imagine, things only escalate from there. I became convinced at a certain point that every single person in this movie was made completely out of watermelon, what with the extreme level to which their heads and bodies would explode into bloody chunks with nearly every blow that was laid upon them.
The cast roster boasts a surprisingly broad range of familiar faces, from Rogue One’s Riz Ahmed and Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham, to Black Widow’s Olga Kurylenko and 28 Weeks Later’s Imogen Poots. Micheal Fassbender carries the show as the lead, but frankly there is so little gas in the tank with this script, that not even he can avoid sounding contrived at times. I honestly think that every last one of them signed on to this project solely so that they could enjoy an all-expenses-paid trip to the Scottish highlands for a few months, and after seeing how many gratuitous shots of the country’s breathtaking mountain ridges were in this thing, I can’t say I blame them. When fake blood wasn’t flying across the screen in startling quantities, the more meditative wide-shots of the forests and mountains tucked in here were truly beautiful.
Overall, this movie had a lot to work with, but wound up doing nothing with it. The cast members and locales are completely lost on a muddled script that has no idea what it wants to do with any of its storylines. It’s got hokey voiceover at odd moments, a near indecipherable font choice used to denote all of the historical locations throughout the runtime, and a commitment to arterial-specific violence that borders on insanity. The characters fall into several painfully cliche gendered tropes, with all of the boys being covered in dirt and blood at all times, while all of the girls stay nearly spotless and maintain perfectly coiffed 2” barrel curls in every scene despite the elements.
I imagine that if you have one of those dads who’s always down for a sword-and-sand epic, regardless of objective quality, then watching this movie together would probably be an ideal bonding activity. If that’s not you, though, I’d advise skipping this one!
Centurion feels like a rough draft of a Gladiator knockoff that couldn’t manage to inspire the budget for a trendy 2010’s 3D treatment. And yes, I know that this movie takes place approximately 70 years before the events in Gladiator, but I bring it up because you can 100% tell that the team behind this was targeting the same crowd.
To bring up another over-the-top historical battle film, this movie also seemed to be attempting to out-pace Zack Snyder’s 300 in terms of sheer CGI blood spray count. The tone is set early on, with the very first on-screen kill occurring when a guard taking a leak off the side of the fort he’s manning gets suddenly speared right in the dick. As you might be able to imagine, things only escalate from there. I became convinced at a certain point that every single person in this movie was made completely out of watermelon, what with the extreme level to which their heads and bodies would explode into bloody chunks with nearly every blow that was laid upon them.
The cast roster boasts a surprisingly broad range of familiar faces, from Rogue One’s Riz Ahmed and Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham, to Black Widow’s Olga Kurylenko and 28 Weeks Later’s Imogen Poots. Micheal Fassbender carries the show as the lead, but frankly there is so little gas in the tank with this script, that not even he can avoid sounding contrived at times. I honestly think that every last one of them signed on to this project solely so that they could enjoy an all-expenses-paid trip to the Scottish highlands for a few months, and after seeing how many gratuitous shots of the country’s breathtaking mountain ridges were in this thing, I can’t say I blame them. When fake blood wasn’t flying across the screen in startling quantities, the more meditative wide-shots of the forests and mountains tucked in here were truly beautiful.
Overall, this movie had a lot to work with, but wound up doing nothing with it. The cast members and locales are completely lost on a muddled script that has no idea what it wants to do with any of its storylines. It’s got hokey voiceover at odd moments, a near indecipherable font choice used to denote all of the historical locations throughout the runtime, and a commitment to arterial-specific violence that borders on insanity. The characters fall into several painfully cliche gendered tropes, with all of the boys being covered in dirt and blood at all times, while all of the girls stay nearly spotless and maintain perfectly coiffed 2” barrel curls in every scene despite the elements.
I imagine that if you have one of those dads who’s always down for a sword-and-sand epic, regardless of objective quality, then watching this movie together would probably be an ideal bonding activity. If that’s not you, though, I’d advise skipping this one!
