E Pluribus WOWZA!!!!

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2011)

When you're picking your battles, never pick to fight the Picts! I watched Centurion last night. It's Neil Marshall's take on the mystery of the Roman 9th Legion, which mysteriously disappeared in Scotland sometime around 117 A.D. Wow.!
I'm not sure how historically accurate any of it is, but the movie is a great time. It's bloody and action packed and never really slows down until literally the very last minute. The acting was better than usual in action movies. Dominic West as The Roman General Titus Flavius Virilus was fantastic, he was just the kind of commander you'd want to serve under and I felt he out-Spartan'ed Gerard Jones from 300. Michael Fassbender was good as the thoughtful Centurion Quintus Dias and Imogene Poot did a nice job as the "witch" Arianne. She put a nice spin on the character, making her more of an outcast than a menace. The scenery is also amazing. I never knew Scotland was so beautiful or even that it has mountains.
But the breakaway star of this movie, hands down, was Olga Kurylenko as Etain, the Pictish scout who hunts Romans. She is quite the Terminator in this movie; she is so overwhelmingly powerful that she almost seems like a force of nature. But her performance isn't all one note. Etain has a good reason to feel and act the way she does. She and her family were horribly brutalized by the Romans and now, as one character put it, "she has an empty whole in her soul that only Roman blood can fill." She does have a final showdown with Fassbender's character, Quintus Dias, and although I don't want to give anything away BUT when Quintus eventually kills her she seems both furious at being killed and relieved that she no longer has to feel the pain of her loss. Maybe I'm getting a little hokey there, but I think she gave a great performance, especially with a character who is mute and can only convey her feelings through her eyes and body language.