CENTVRION

This movie almost counts as a lost classic, because it didn’t make much impression when it was released, and has not had the distinction of becoming a cult film, but it really, absolutely deserves to be. It especially should be appreciated by fans of Sword & Sorcery and Howard, because this is, without doubt, the most Howardian movie ever made.

Directed by British filmmaker Neil Marshall in 2010, Centurion is the story of the historical 9^th Legion, which vanished sometime in the 2^nd century and has long been thought to have been destroyed in some unrecorded military disaster in northern Britain. Since we don’t know for sure what happened, it has been fertile ground for imaginings, with numerous books and films happy to fill in the details history has not left us.

Marshall, director of such gleeful slices of mayhem as Doomsday and The Descent, turns this into a bloody, savage tale of revenge, survival, and treachery laced with gruesome violence and gorgeous cinematography. Shot on location in remote corners of Scotland like Badenoch and Strathspey, the film is filled with desolate vistas of the cold, forbidding Scottish highlands – lands which have remained largely unchanged in the 1800 years since the time depicted in the movie, and still retain their brooding, prehistoric aspect. This lends the look of the film a tremendous authenticity and atmosphere that it otherwise would not have had.

The cast is similarly on-point. Micheal Fassbender gives a commanding, dynamic performance as hero Quintus Dias, and he is joined by a list of fine actors who are all on their game, including several who would go on to greater notoriety. Dominic West is massively charismatic in his role as General Virilus, and former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko is mesmerizing as the Pictish huntress Etain. Liam Cunningham (pre-Game of Thrones) turns up, as do Riz Ahmed, Noel Clarke, and Imogen Poots. The characters are sketched out quickly but sharply, mostly showing who they are rather than telling, and everyone is doing good work.

The action scenes are symphonies of violence, not shying away from blood to get a PG-13 nor wallowing in fake-looking CGI gore. The effects are practical, and the battles are a litany of decapitations, slit throats, hacked limbs, and impalements. So many of the fight scenes can be paused at any point you like to reveal a tableau that would stand up as a cover for any given collection of stories about the Romans in Britain. The music, by the great Ilan Eshkeri, deserves special mention, as it is sweeping and dramatic, elevating everything to another level entirely.

Much like Fury Road, Centurion is really one long chase, with the heroes seemingly pursued from one end of Scotland to the other by revenge-driven Pictish warriors. Kurylenko is especially intimidating in her role as the mute huntress who will stop at nothing to catch and destroy her enemies, and who kills and savages men ferally and fearlessly. The script does not slow down much for any philosophizing or brooding, but is instead a steel-edged spear driving straight ahead. It’s a simple setup of men who will do anything to survive pitted against others who will go to any lengths to kill them. It expertly cranks up the tension and largely keeps it cranked. Fassbender as Quintus starts out as a man trying to do his duty and ends up just trying to survive against pitiless odds.

Given how much Howard loved the Picts and how much he wrote about them, this is like a movie he could have written himself. It is very much in the spirit of classic tales like “Worms of the Earth” or “Kings of the Night”, lacking only an overt supernatural element. If it had that, then Centurion would easily be the best Sword & Sorcery movie ever made. Lacking that, it is still the kind of movie Howard himself would have loved, and there is more of his spirit in it than in any movie based on anything he wrote.

Sadly, the film didn’t do much business – mostly due to a lack of marketing and bad reviews by weak-kneed critics who couldn’t handle all the violence. It lost money and caused a major slowdown of Marshall’s directing career, as he wouldn’t helm another film until this year’s Hellboy. Nevertheless, I think Centurion is his best work to date. It’s tight, focused, well-acted, and gorgeous to look at – it’s amazing to me he made a movie that looks this good for just $12 million, when films like the 2011 Conan spent more than seven times that much and came out as bloated crap. If you haven’t seen Centurion, then you should.

The Jewel of the Sea

Ashari rose before the dawn, and she went through the rituals of awakening. She bathed and allowed her slaves to oil her copper skin, she polished her horns and her hooves until they shone. She ate a meal of raw meats and sliced fruits, drank deep of honeyed wine, and then she decked herself for battle. Servants brought her golden armor and adorned her with steel and polished bronze. She donned a helm fitted to her rising horns and she buckled on her slender, curved sword.

The sun climbed over the mountains in the east and sent red fire lancing across the sky to touch the towers of Irdru with fire and the color of blood. Ashari left her chambers and went out into the clean air, smelling smoke and the bright taste of the salt sea. She looked out to the north and saw the endless waves rolling and falling in on themselves. There lay horizons no one had transgressed, and unknown lands far from the threat of war.

Then she turned south and looked out over the beautiful city she had found and taken and polished until it gleamed like a jewel on the edge of the waters. Over the gleaming black streets and the slender, delicate towers. She looked over temples and domes and the brilliant white walls to the shadows of the savannah beyond, and on that golden grassland there spread a black shadow growing ever closer. She gave a sign and horns pealed through the dawn quiet, calling out over the city, summoning all to defend their home.

The harbor was strangely still, as every merchant who could travel had loaded their goods aboard whatever ship there was to hand and sailed away. Ashari herself had provided ship after ship to carry away the people and whatever they could carry with them. Part of this was mercy, but part was also her wish to have as few mouths to feed as was possible, in case they were besieged.

And there was a part of her, even in the fires of her defiance, that did not believe they could win this battle. Word had come from her riders and her scouts that the enemy had gathered more strength to him, and now perhaps a hundred thousand marched for Irdru beneath a banner of death, dragging a train of prisoners and engines of destruction. It was an army forged by hatred and the will to dominate, and it came to extinguish the city like a candle flame.

Solomon Kane

This is probably the best film ever adapted from a Howard character, which makes it all the more surprising that it made so little impact – both in the fandom and on the world at large. Kane is very much one of Howard’s best-known creations, and yet he is, to the wider public, almost unknown. The rights for the character were bought up on 1997, but the film did not go into production until 2008 – more than a decade afterward.

I can remember hearing news about this, and even following director M. J. Bassett’s blog detailing the struggle to get the movie made and then the even greater struggle to get it released. The film was made independently, and it was unable to secure a wide distribution deal for years, so that the release came out in dribs and drabs from late 2009 to the final North American theatrical run in 2012. The strung-out release schedule and lack of marketing surely hurt the film’s ability to build momentum, and it ended up losing money and all but vanishing.

I first saw it on a bootleg DVD before the US release, and I remember being underwhelmed by it. Now you can just stream it on Netflix anytime you want, and I decided a close rewatch was in order, since I have been going through the high-profile Sword & Sorcery films and weighing them with a careful eye.

There’s a lot to like here, really. The cinematography is uniformly gorgeous, and the sets and locations look really good. Shot on location in Scotland and the Czech Republic, it makes great use of the sorts of wide, moody vistas you can only get in places like that. James Purefoy is a fantastic choice for Kane, as not only does he look great, but he can really act and gives the hero a lot of depth. He’s an accomplished rider and swordsman, and he radiates danger and handles the fight sequences with a dynamic charisma and flair.

Speaking of the fight choreography, it is actually really good – light years ahead of any of the Conan films besides maybe the first one. The violence is appropriately bloody and savage – no PG-13 nonsense here – and even the weapons look good, being both realistic and mostly accurate for the period. The costuming is good, and once Purefoy gets the whole ensemble together with the hat and the cape, he just looks like Solomon Kane is supposed to look.

The cast is really strong as well. Besides Purefoy, we have Pete Postelthwaite (in one of his last roles), Alice Krige, Max Von Sydow, and the lovely Rachel Hurd-Wood in a role that practically embodies the kind of virtuous maiden Kane was always trying to save. Jason Flemyng has a brief but memorable role as the evil sorcerer (with a fantastic look from costuming and makeup) and even a pre-Game of Thrones Rory McCann turns up in a background role.

So what’s wrong with it? Why does it incite antipathy from Howard fans and indifference from the wider world? Well, this movie had a problem, in that Solomon Kane is a cult character, and you can either stick hard to established storylines and make the cult fans happy, or you can try to make a movie that appeals to a wider audience and sell the idea of Solomon Kane to a public that doesn’t know who he is.

They went for option B, but the script is kind of weak. The dialogue is often bad, only partly saved by good performances, and after a fairly strong first act, the movie hits a real slump through the middle third, where the plot just does not seem to be moving forward. Once it finally does, things improve, and the climactic battle is solid. But when we finally reach the confrontation with the sorcerer Malachi, we start to have a problem of Too Many Elements. The evil wizard and his masked Vader make for a good final boss team, and could have worked well, but as it is, the movie rushes those confrontations to squeeze in a big, flaming demon for the final boss, and the CGI just is not up to the drill. It doesn’t look terrible, and the design is good, but the effects just look cheap. In fact, every time this movie tries to go for big effects it kind of looks silly, as the $40 million budget just could not afford the kind of stuff they tried to do.

So there’s a lot of good elements here, but the script just doesn’t come together, and has tonal issues and pacing problems that make you spend a lot of time waiting for things you know are going to happen, but the movie tries to pretend are big reveals. The script hammers down on its themes really hard, without anything in the way of subtlety, and gets kind of preachy in places as a result. One serious problem is that the movie made its metaphysical underpinnings literally true, and Kane’s quest to redeem himself from an evil life is not an inner struggle but an outer one. This removes all the maturity and nuance from his intentions. In the stories, Kane was a man trying to do good in an evil world because he was driven to by inner forces; here he is driven by an express threat that a huge, sword-wielding demon will drag his soul to hell if he does not do good. It fundamentally changes the nature of the character.

In the end, almost no one cared. Solomon Kane, the film, was probably doomed from the start by the fact that there was not a large, hungry audience waiting for it. The people who already know and love Solomon Kane as a character were always going to see it, even if it was terrible. Bassett’s job as screenwriter and director was to not just make a good movie, but to make one that would sell Kane to an audience who didn’t know him. The final movie has grit and is beautiful to look at, but it’s not tight enough and overall presents such a dark, unpleasant world that people didn’t see a reason to care. There were plans for two sequels that were never made, and this just highlights the old adage about doing a series: don’t save the good stuff for later, because you might not get to do it.

The Mountain of Bones

In the red wastelands on the horizon of empire, two armies stalked one another like beasts by night. The red sun blazed down as Shath drove his army across the stony red desert toward the jagged outline of the black mountains that reared against the deep violet sky. The claws of the war-beasts churned up a great pillar of dust, and so there was no concealing where he marched, but none could predict where he might turn.

Ahead of him the mountains were stark and dagger-sharp, and he knew of at least three passes through them that he might take. He knew, from Ellai’s inner sight, that a great army of the enemy awaited him, but they shifted restlessly, and he did not know if they meant to meet him or to try and slip around and flank him by night. The mountains were the boundary between the desolate regions of the western empire and the settled, fertile lands beyond. Once he crossed them, he would be lodged within the empire’s very heart, and he would mark his path with blood.

They camped through the heat of the day, sheltering among rocks and beneath the stone overhangs of ancient waterways, now long dry. The urugan raised their pavilion for Ellai, and Shath joined her, sat beside her in the cool darkness and took her hand when she offered it. “Tell me what you see,” he said.

Her eyes were closed, and her breath stirred the thin silk of the veil she wore across her pale face. “There is a power that guards them, and I cannot see clearly. There are images and echoes that seem made to deceive me. I see a vast army, footmen, riders, and giants made of flesh and darkness. There is a rider who commands, and something with him – a mind without a body. It. . . it speaks to other minds across the far distances, it speaks to a dark one who walks the horizons.”

“The emperor,” Shath said, his jaw set with lines of anger and pain. He flexed his iron right hand. “He controls his army from afar.”

“I believe he does,” she said. Her eyelids fluttered like moth wings. “There are engines of war with them. Machines that smoke and burn and are tended by men who worship them like gods.” She flinched, recoiling from something unseen, and then she opened her eyes. “They are hidden from me now.” She looked at him. “There are many thousands of them. They have been sent to face and destroy you, and they are more than we are. Three of them for each two of the urugan, and their war machines will kill many upon many.”

He leaned closer. “You know I have a weapon to equal them. But I must know where they are.”

Slowly, Ellai drew back a corner of the rug she sat on and traced forms in the dust with her fingertip. “There are two passes wide and open enough for them to pass. They want to wait until you are crossing and then strike you from behind with riders, pin you in place, and then strike like a hammer. They are here.” She drew a line in the dust. “They await you behind the northernmost pass, with riders detached and ready to move through the southernmost, here.”

Shath nodded, picturing the passes as he knew them. The northernmost pass was wider, best for quick movement of foot troops and engines. There was a plateau near the highest point, beside a black lake and below the shadow of the tallest peak. “Then we will draw them to us. At dawn we will move into the northern pass, and take a position beside the lake. We will wait for them.”

“Defense does not suit your warriors,” Ellai said. “Riders must have room to charge and not stand against one.”

“I shall give them room,” he said. “Let the enemy come against me – they shall learn I possess a sword such as they have never seen.”