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Thursday, August 19, 2010

BD impressions: Centurion

8:51 PM / BD Impressions / 14 Comments

I was pleasantly surprised by CENTURION. After the disappointment of Neil Marshall's previous film, DOOMSDAY - a sloppy and ill-disciplined hodge-podge of homages to various genres which started off amusingly stupid but quickly succumbed to being just plain stupid - my hopes weren't exactly through the roof for his take on the fate of the infamous Ninth Legion which, so legend says, disappeared in Britain in the early second century AD. (Incidentally, it was also the subject of a book I read as a child, Rosemary's Sutcliff's THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH - itself being adapted for the screen by Jeremy Brock and Kevin Macdonald.)

To my surprise, it's actually very good, and far from the low-grade knock-off of GLADIATOR that the subject matter and promotion would seem to suggest. ("Britain's answer to GLADIATOR!" screams that exalted tome, NUTS, on the back cover - conveniently forgetting that GLADIATOR's director and most of its crew WERE British.) CENTURION is actually a chase movie that actually has quite a bit more in common with those POW escape movies than any historical epic I've ever seen. It's brief, bloody and not particularly subtle, but it knows exactly what it is and gives the audience what it wants to see: lots of tension, lots of battle scenes, and a fair amount of the old tomato ketchup. You've got a decent (some might say over-qualified) cast giving it their all, savvy use of the limited budget, and a director who absolutely knows the meaning of crowd-pleasing. You honestly couldn't ask for much more.

THE DESCENT remains Marshall's best film by a considerable margin, but he has regained a lot of the ground that he lost for me with DOOMSDAY, and I'm definitely looking forward to whatever he cooks up next.

Image quality: There are few nits to pick with this VC-1 encode from Pathé. The film does look a little soft at times, but I'm inclined to suspect that the photography itself is at fault here, for the look is inconsistent and some shots look significantly better than others. Compression is generally fine, although some wide shots do have that smoothed over, "watercolour" look that sometimes crops up in VC-1 encodes with inadequate bit rates. Basically, it's a fine-looking disc, albeit one that looks a little underwhelming when viewed straight after the remastered edition of the eleven-year-old GLADIATOR. 9/10

Centurion
studio: Pathé; country: UK; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 25 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 36.77 Mbit/sec

14 Comments

 
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