Review of Centurion (2010) by Spangle — 29 Oct 2015

Centurion is a mixed bag, but there is far more good than bad. However, let's focus in on the bad. For one, it is far too violent. After a certain point, it becomes numbing and the CGI blood just becomes a major nuisance.

You do not have to slit everyone's throat or show blood spurting from every wound for me to understand that war is bloody. Like, I got it. In addition, the character development is incredibly poor. Other than a few main characters, the names of these people really just slipped my mind immediately after I heard them.

In war films, characters often remain largely anonymous due to a focus on action. Centurion is no different as I could not tell you who any of these people are. In saying this, however, there are many positives.

For one, the film is breathtakingly gorgeous at times. The cinematography is stellar. The fight choreography is also brilliantly done, which goes hand-in-hand with the excellent action sequences. There are a good number of them, but they are all edge of your seat exciting and perfectly sequenced.

The direction from Neil Marshall is not fantastic, but it gets the job done. The film feels coherent and is extremely well-paced, to the point that it feels shorter even with an already short run time.

Finally, the acting from Michael Fassbender and Dominic West is great. Olga Kurylenko even does well with zero lines of dialogue. She did a great job capturing the terror instilled by her character even without uttering a single word.

Overall, Centurion is a good action film that will be too violent for some, but if you can deal with that element of it, you are in for a surprise.