Writer/director Neil Marshall has style and hopefully will continue to bring it forth on cinema screens for years to come, if he decides to travel back to America or not. Many lesser auteurs would have taken that Hollywood payday and looked for another to follow. Marshall, however, hot on the success of his spelunking horror/thriller The Descent, made Doomsday with US money only to see it falter out of the starting gate. Perhaps he had deals to remain stateside, but instead found himself back home in the UK to craft his war epic of Northern English history. Going back to 117 AD, Centurion relays the tale of the lost Roman Ninth Legion—the last ditch attempt by the great empire to oust guerilla Picts from England. With no survivors to tell the tale, Marshall’s film recalls a similar work of unknown bloodshed in 300, more portraying the heroism and courage of these men fighting for their land, for their general, and for their freedom than the facts.

A lot goes on during the first half of the movie, starting with an introduction to Michael Fassbender’s titular Centurion, Quintus Dias, as our narrator, it being neither the beginning of his story, nor the end. Second in command of his Roman force, his men are massacred mercilessly—Marshall never afraid to show exploding heads, pierced limbs, blood covered roads, or shrieking screams of pain and death—his survival only earned due to his ability to speak the Pict language. Brought back to their king, Ulrich Thomsen’s farmer turned murderer Gorlacon, the Centurion is cut and beaten, tortured to learn the whereabouts of his superiors and their next moves. Refusing to betray his empire as he bleeds in front of the king’s son, showing the young boy the face of his enemy, Dias soon finds escape, running through the snowy, mountainous expanse, captors on his trail and running towards a newly dispatched regime of Romans looking to take control of England once and for all.

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