Historical Fiction: Centurion (And What We Think We Know about the Ninth Legion) (no spoilers)
100 Historical Things, Number 19
Last night we rewatched the film Centurion, which is a British film, set in 117 AD, in Roman Britain. I recommend it very highly indeed.
The cast is top-notch, for starters: Michael Fassbender plays the principal character (Quintus Dias), but it is an ensemble piece and there is wonderful support from Dominic West, David Morrissey[1], Liam Cunningham, Lee Ross, Noel Clarke and even Paul Freeman, among others. The director/writer is Neil Marshall (who also wrote and directed the rather wonderful film Dog Soldiers). It is very nice indeed to see the British film industry at its stunning best.
Now, I want to come at this review from a historical angle. The film centres around the loss of the Ninth Legion, otherwise known as Legio IX Hispana (which may or may not have been raised in Hispania by Pompey in the 1st C BC, a possible origin of the label 'Hispana'). We all know the story of the Ninth, right? How it was lost somewhere north of Hadrian's Wall and nobody knew exactly what happened to it...
OK, actually, what we know is primarily the version told by the writer Rosemary Sutcliff in the famous children's book The Eagle of the Ninth. How many of us read that book as a child and got caught up in the sweeping Scottish landscapes and Aquila's quest to find out what really happened to his father? (You may also remember that there was a recent film of this version of the tale, The Eagle; this is well worth a watch, but it's not as exciting as Centurion and I wasn't so thrilled with the acting). In fact, we don't know for sure what happened to the legion, and some hisorians have argued more recently that it may not have been lost in the north of Britain after all!
Centurion takes the disappearance of the Ninth in a completely different direction from the Sutcliff vision. Rather than a simple quest movie, Marshall goes for a sort of buddy/slasher movie. At the beginning we get all the set up of a group of soldiers (Morrissey, Cunningham, Ross, etc) in their camp, with their wonderfully gruff and down to earth general Virilus (played to perfection by West), whom they will all happily die for. Add a newcomer (Fassbender) who has managed to escape after being captured by the (rather scary) Picts, an officer who is dying to get back to Rome and so wants to put down the Pict threat (Freeman), and a Pict scout now working for the Romans (played by Olga Kurylenko). It's not a spoiler to tell you that the legion doesn't come out of this situation in-tact, I think! And the movie is then all about how and whether the survivors survive, and the camaraderie between them as they try to do so.
If one were to nit-pick about 'historical accuracy', inevitably one would find something or other to complain about - some of the soldiers' equipment, for instance. But this isn't like Gladiator, the sort of film where the ancient world is put on display and you inevitably spend some of your time thinking things like 'Hang on, what do you mean Rome was founded a Republic??' This is a film about its characters and what they're going through, and what's more it doesn't have the sort of camerawork that makes you scrutinise the soldiers' armour to see whether you think it is faithful to the period. It's good enough to look realistic, and the story is sufficiently absorbing and pacey to leave you with very little time to nit-pick.
Some nice modern allusions are thrown in - the soldiers talk like modern soldiers, they are of very mixed origin (a gladiator's son who has become a centurion, a celt, a Greek, a Numidian, a cook who happens to survive the fighting, etc)[2], the situation in northern Britain with Picts waging guerilla warfare is cast in a very similar mould to the war in Afghanistan today, and one soldier even talks of this being his 'last tour'. I'm not sure whether those slightly modern overtones will be disturbing to some, but I don't find them so - and anyway, show me a piece of historical fiction that doesn't say as much about the time when it was written as the time when it is set!
My point overall is that, especially in fiction, history is what you make of it. All history is interpretation, really. And in the case of Centurion, Marshall has taken a historical setting and created a rather marvellous story.
[1] Ooh, there are new people reading this, so I can do my boasting bit again! David Morrissey's sister was my games teacher at school :)
[2] Admittedly, it's very likely that 2nd C AD soldiers in a Roman legion really would have had such mixed origins - I'm not saying this is inaccurate, I just thinking it's quite modern in the way they talk about their backgrounds.
Last night we rewatched the film Centurion, which is a British film, set in 117 AD, in Roman Britain. I recommend it very highly indeed.
The cast is top-notch, for starters: Michael Fassbender plays the principal character (Quintus Dias), but it is an ensemble piece and there is wonderful support from Dominic West, David Morrissey[1], Liam Cunningham, Lee Ross, Noel Clarke and even Paul Freeman, among others. The director/writer is Neil Marshall (who also wrote and directed the rather wonderful film Dog Soldiers). It is very nice indeed to see the British film industry at its stunning best.
Now, I want to come at this review from a historical angle. The film centres around the loss of the Ninth Legion, otherwise known as Legio IX Hispana (which may or may not have been raised in Hispania by Pompey in the 1st C BC, a possible origin of the label 'Hispana'). We all know the story of the Ninth, right? How it was lost somewhere north of Hadrian's Wall and nobody knew exactly what happened to it...
OK, actually, what we know is primarily the version told by the writer Rosemary Sutcliff in the famous children's book The Eagle of the Ninth. How many of us read that book as a child and got caught up in the sweeping Scottish landscapes and Aquila's quest to find out what really happened to his father? (You may also remember that there was a recent film of this version of the tale, The Eagle; this is well worth a watch, but it's not as exciting as Centurion and I wasn't so thrilled with the acting). In fact, we don't know for sure what happened to the legion, and some hisorians have argued more recently that it may not have been lost in the north of Britain after all!
Centurion takes the disappearance of the Ninth in a completely different direction from the Sutcliff vision. Rather than a simple quest movie, Marshall goes for a sort of buddy/slasher movie. At the beginning we get all the set up of a group of soldiers (Morrissey, Cunningham, Ross, etc) in their camp, with their wonderfully gruff and down to earth general Virilus (played to perfection by West), whom they will all happily die for. Add a newcomer (Fassbender) who has managed to escape after being captured by the (rather scary) Picts, an officer who is dying to get back to Rome and so wants to put down the Pict threat (Freeman), and a Pict scout now working for the Romans (played by Olga Kurylenko). It's not a spoiler to tell you that the legion doesn't come out of this situation in-tact, I think! And the movie is then all about how and whether the survivors survive, and the camaraderie between them as they try to do so.
If one were to nit-pick about 'historical accuracy', inevitably one would find something or other to complain about - some of the soldiers' equipment, for instance. But this isn't like Gladiator, the sort of film where the ancient world is put on display and you inevitably spend some of your time thinking things like 'Hang on, what do you mean Rome was founded a Republic??' This is a film about its characters and what they're going through, and what's more it doesn't have the sort of camerawork that makes you scrutinise the soldiers' armour to see whether you think it is faithful to the period. It's good enough to look realistic, and the story is sufficiently absorbing and pacey to leave you with very little time to nit-pick.
Some nice modern allusions are thrown in - the soldiers talk like modern soldiers, they are of very mixed origin (a gladiator's son who has become a centurion, a celt, a Greek, a Numidian, a cook who happens to survive the fighting, etc)[2], the situation in northern Britain with Picts waging guerilla warfare is cast in a very similar mould to the war in Afghanistan today, and one soldier even talks of this being his 'last tour'. I'm not sure whether those slightly modern overtones will be disturbing to some, but I don't find them so - and anyway, show me a piece of historical fiction that doesn't say as much about the time when it was written as the time when it is set!
My point overall is that, especially in fiction, history is what you make of it. All history is interpretation, really. And in the case of Centurion, Marshall has taken a historical setting and created a rather marvellous story.
[1] Ooh, there are new people reading this, so I can do my boasting bit again! David Morrissey's sister was my games teacher at school :)
[2] Admittedly, it's very likely that 2nd C AD soldiers in a Roman legion really would have had such mixed origins - I'm not saying this is inaccurate, I just thinking it's quite modern in the way they talk about their backgrounds.