Unnamed Gods

 

Jaya went down to the sea by moonlight, hearing the cresting tide ahead of her as it seethed across the sands.  The moon was low on the horizon, gleaming like a crescent blade through the clear night air, touching the low clouds with red.  She wondered if the stories were true and it dipped down beneath the earth and immersed itself in the sea of blood each night.  She did not really believe it, as she knew the motions of the stars and the moon were part of the ancient arts of voyaging over the open sea.

She came to the shore, and there stood the black stone that had marked where her ancestors made their covenant with the gods, and where her brother’s blood had broken that covenant for her.  The Tau-ta had made their oath so that they might vanish from the wider world, but now that ancient protection seemed to be an illusion, like mist over the dawn shore.

In her hands was a spear, and she planted it at the edge of the water, where the waves reached highest, foaming around the base of the obelisk.  She took a hollow gourd from where it hung over her shoulder and she held it up.  Here, mixed inside, were ashes from the pyre of her father, and of Anut.  She had taken them, though she knew she was not meant to touch them.  The pyres were supposed to stand until the waves took them away, but she had taken a handful from each, and now she opened the gourd and looked inside at the darkness there, as though it could bite her.

Her heart beat harder as she reached inside and drew forth a handful of ashes, feeling them in her grasp like beach sand.  It was not the feathery ash of burnt wood, but harder and gritty, like stones.  She held it up to the moon and though she wanted to speak, her tongue seemed stilled in her mouth.

The Legion

 

I’ve covered a lot of the old, classic S&S movies I thought were worth talking about, and I have reviewed some more recent efforts, but now for the new year I have decided to dig in on the offerings to be found on streaming services.  Streaming and the need for content has resulted in widespread distribution of movies that are Sword & Sorcery – or at least S&S adjacent – to a greater degree than anything seen since the Golden Age of home video first began in the 80s.  So let’s see what there is, and if any of it is worth seeing, starting with 2020’s The Legion.

First off, the way this movie is billed is highly misleading.  From the poster it looks like you will have Mickey Rourke and Bai Ling as unlikely companions battling their way through a forbidding landscape to get to some big battle scene at the end.  That’s not what this is.

Rourke is in this, but he plays a general who only enters the narrative at the end, while he gets some monologue scenes that are sprinkled through the movie like a framing device.  He’s not the star of the movie, and you’ll be glad of that, because this is probably the most embarrassing performance by an Oscar winner I have ever seen.  He has weird makeup on, including disturbingly long, fake eyelashes and what I swear look like Lee Press-On Nails.  You get the feeling he shot all his stuff in one day and is probably reading the lines off cue cards, as he mispronounces multiple Roman names and just generally seems like he doesn’t want to be there.

Bai Ling only has one scene at the end with Rourke, and it is like whatever the opposite of an Oscar clip would be called, as they both recite stilted dialogue in a dragging, deadpan style.  At the beginning of the film we get some scenes with Joaquim de Almeida and Vladimir Kulich which are bizarrely shot on a green screen set, as the backgrounds are static and there is a very obvious cutout line around everybody’s head.  Kulich at least manages to inject some drama into his performance, but de Almeida just isn’t trying at all.

The bulk of this movie follows a guy called Noreno, played by an almost unknown guy named Lee Partridge.  Noreno is chosen for a mission to cross from Armenia to Syria to bring a message to Rourke’s General Corbulo to come and relieve the besieged forces of General Paetus – following historical events that actually happened in rough outline.  Thus, we are supposed to believe the guy makes a journey of over 500 miles on foot in about 9 days – which you could maybe do if you traveled 12 hours a day without stopping, which is not what he does.

This could be a solid setup for a story, and there are some good things to recommend here.  Partridge is not bad, and has a kind of easy likability.  The costuming is pretty good, and the weapons are anachronistic, but mostly don’t look glaringly fake.  The fight choreography is not terrible, and manages some drama.  The music is actually quite good, and the cinematography is uniformly excellent.  The movie was mostly filmed in Asturias in northern Spain, and they took great advantage of the gorgeous landscapes and the sweep of the mountain vistas.  When you see a snowstorm, it’s an actual snowstorm, and the rock-climbing scenes show real climbing, not a dude on a green studio set.

The rest of the cast is mostly pretty bad.  The guys playing “Parthians”(or in Rourke’s dialogue “Parthinians”) all look Irish, mostly because they are, and while they are enthusiastic, they can’t do much with the bad dialogue.  Marta Castellvi is luminous in her brief part, but she doesn’t even have lines.  Bosco Hogan has some gravitas in his odd but better-acted cameo, but there’s really no reason for the scene to be there.

The big problem is that the script is very thin, and the movie is padded out with loooong sequences of Noreno just jogging through the wilderness.  Even though the landscape is gorgeous, it goes on too long and is extremely tedious.  The action is too little and too far apart, and everything is very slow and seems to go on way too long.  When there is dialogue, you wish it would stop, as the writing is painfully stilted and bland.  Even good actors can’t do much with this shit, and most of the actors here are either not good or not really making any effort.

While this is obviously influenced by movies like Centurion or The Eagle, it is nowhere near as good, and even a few good qualities cannot make it into something I would recommend.  The whole thing seems like it might be building toward a big battle scene, but that was obviously beyond the meager budget this production had access to, and The Legion ends with a whimper.  This is on Prime Video, but you can skip it.

The Blood Tide

 

The morning wind was sweet through the tamarind and acacia trees, carrying the smell of the dawning sea.  Jaya waded through the waist-high grass, carrying her fishing net looped over her shoulder, the bare earth soft under her feet.  The birds in the trees were just beginning to waken and sing softly, though she knew the sun would soon come up over the hills behind her and they would burst into a riot of sound and motion.

She heard her younger brother, Anut, following along behind her, muttering as he pushed through the grasses in her wake.  He was shorter than she was, even though he was thirteen, and he struggled to keep up with her longer strides.  She smiled to herself.  It would not be long before he was old enough to be tattooed and named a man – let him walk behind her for a little longer.

There was a mist in the morning air, and she looked up as they came to the edge of the trees.  From here the slope down to the sea was shallow, and at the edge of the sand there was a sharp black stone that jutted up from the ground, the surface gleaming with sea spray and etched with coiled signs.  When their ancestors first came to Ulu’a, driven out of their ancient island homes by their enemies, they raised this stone as a marker.  A sign to all the Unnamed Gods that the Tau’ta would go no further.

She stopped and stood for a moment, letting Anut catch up to her.  He was carrying his own net as well as a barbed fishing spear.  She thought him too eager – the water would be too cloudy from the past night’s storm for spearing fish.

This early, just after dawn, the light from the sun was still shrouded behind the central hills of the island behind them.  The sea was an expanse of silvery motion, darkening as it extended away toward the lands of sunset, marked at the limit of her sight by the line of white breakers where the reef walled them off from the deeper realms her people had long left behind.  Once, she knew, they had sailed the seas, and had been kings in a far western land, but that had ended long ago.