Centurion (2010)

Hanging out with my friends today meant I was clueless as to what I might see. Pretty much everyone will bring over a selection of movies to the person's house we're meeting at, and that's exactly what happened. I had a bit of a choice, and of the the bunch, everyone wanted to see Centurion starring Michael Fassbender who you may have seen earlier this year in X-men: First Class as Magneto. I really liked him in that so I had no problem with this. In case you were wondering, the other movie that we could have watched was Valhalla Rising. But alas, I did not choose that, so my thoughts on Centurion can be found after the jump.


The story here is a retelling of the famous Roman 9th Legion that went missing. In history, it is said the 9th went out to fight the enemy, and simply never returned. Were they killed, did they abandon their duties, no one knows. Centurion tells a tale of what happened to them as they trekked deeper into enemy territory. In this movie, they are attacked and decimated by the enemy. The handful of survivors, now deep behind enemy lines, need to save their General and survive the wilds and somehow find their way back to Roman controlled land.

Hey, it's Magneto! Oh wait, wrong movie.

While I knew who Michael Fassbender was, I figured this would be a budget movie he used to just get his name out there and get a paycheck. It wasn't until we started watching it that I started recognizing faces of some of the other actors. As we watched the movie, one by one we started placing where we had all seen these various actors.

First we recognized Dominic West from The Wire. Then we placed Olga Kurylenko in Quantum of Solace. Finally we were surprised to see Noel Clarke pop up from the new Doctor Who series. There were still plenty of other people we didn't recognize, but I'm happy to report that they were all pretty good. No one was cheesy or bad at all, and in fact the whole movie had a much more serious feel to it than I had expected when we first started watching it.

Olga Kurylenko plays a deadly and relentless tracker who will hunt you down to the death

The only really budget thing that stood out to me was the blood effects. Similar to Pathfinder the blood is all CG, and obviously CG. It strangely spurts and sprays out of people as if their bodies are all highly pressurised. It was almost to the levels of anime blood to be blunt. The other thing was that it was always HIGHLY visible, even in the night scenes. I figured it was because the CG didn't have proper lighting effects on it, but it ended up making it look like the blood was almost glowing because it was so clear even in pitch black. I should note that it didn't take too long to get used to the way the blood looked, and by the mid point of the film I wasn't being distracted by it anymore.

While the blood effects looked really odd, the positive thing to take away from this is that there was a TON of it! There was so much brutal bloody action, and so many deaths in so many horrible ways! People's heads get chopped clear in half causing the top half of heads to fly off, as well as all manner of limbs. It was like human beings were just incredibly delicate and fragile beings, flying apart with the slightest touch of a blade. Once again, the level of violence was at near anime proportions. In this case though, I found the action to be really good. Many deaths, many times, caused everyone in the room to sit up and yell in surprise at how brutal they were. One of which was the very first death of the film.

While I can't find any pictures for it, believe me there is a TON of blood in this movie

As for the rest of the film, I found the locations and costumes and even the story to be pretty good. It wasn't great, but I was satisfied and entertained. Several times someone would shout out what they thought the obvious thing that would happen next, and rarely did that actually happen. Not that it was filled with twists, but at least they didn't always go down the most obvious story path. For example, we were certain at the start that, similar to most budget movies, one of the 2 gorgeous women in the film would at some point of a sexy love scene to thrill the audience. While this may be a bit of a spoiler, surprisingly nothing of the sort ever happened.. Then again, for the cheap thrills it always had plenty of bloodshed.

I didn't really expect to enjoy this movie when it was picked from the pile. It just looks so generic from the outside. I'm glad to report that I was pleasantly surprised to find a decent film that seemed to  come out of nowhere. I mean, this movie is only a year old, but I don't remember it ever being in the theaters. I could be wrong, but at any rate I think this is a good movie to entertain you if you find yourself with nothing going on. Better yet, get a bunch of friends together and have fun shouting at the screen when yet another bloody kill happens.