Thrilling historic fiction movie with a disappointing end

Rating: 7/10 (13 June 2015)

Centurion by Neil Marshall is set in Ancient Britain during the Roman conquest and is very loosely based on some obscure historic facts. The movie follows the titular character, Quintus Dia (Michael Fassbender), who during one night in a camp gets captured by Picts, a vicious tribe that defiantly fights against Romans. However, he is soon rescued by a legion led by General Virilus (Dominic West). This victory does not lost long, because this legion soon gets ambushed by Picts. Most of the Romans are killed, the General gets captured, so a very small group of survivors has to fight its way through the harsh wilderness and evade a hunting party led by the ruthless mute Etain (Olga Kurylenko).
The movie lacks any large-scale proportions and instead focuses on several characters. Dia, Bothos (David Morrissey) and Brick (Liam Cunningham) are the main characters, and most other characters die quite easily. Arianne (Imogen Poots) was originally supposed to be an important character with an interesting back-story, but that was changed and she is just a minor character in the movie. Although the fight scenes are mostly small and with only a few participants, they are extremely violent and gritty. You rarely get to see so much gore and blood in similar movies, so Centurion is unusual with its superbly done gore effects. People often get graphically stabbed with spears, swords or arrows and they sure do bleed a lot, which looks amazing and quite realistic.
One of the best things in the movie is the beautiful scenery. The movie shows various landscapes of Britain, such as forests, plains, rivers, hills etc, which look breath-taking. There are even some scenes where the actors really run across some snowy mountains in the freezing weather. Filming all these landscapes must have been quite difficult and few film-makers would put so much effort in it.
The ending is something I dislike greatly about this movie, since it's very anticlimactic. There is no big battle between Romans and Picts; instead the plot changes and the last few minutes of the movie are spent portraying the Romans as the bad guys (but not the main characters). Personally, I find this extremely disappointing and badly executed, so it's probably the weakest part of the movie.
So, if you like gritty action scenes and movies about Ancient Rome, feel free to watch Centurion. Its ending is quite problematic and most of the scenes are relatively simple, but the movie does have many good moments.