Centurion (2009)

The Roman epic from Director Neil Marshall starring Michael Fassbender as a roman centurion that starts the film escaping from the Picts and linking up with the 9th Legion who have been sent over the border to wipe out the picts. This story is an off shoot and side story from the book the Eagle of the 9th Legion and looks at some survivors of the failed invasion trying to escape from the hostile lands of the north. I have to say that from the outset I was keen to see this film, I really like Neil Marshall as a director and have not disliked anything he has done (Doomsday confused me when i first saw it but still liked it).

This has a wide and varied cast with Michael Fassbender in the role of the Centurion Quintas Dias, Olga Kurylenko as Etain the mute Pict who is vicious and deadly, you then have several actors as Romans in the group trying to get back in to their own territories including David Morrissey and Noel Clarke, you have Axelle Carolyn playing a pict called Aeron, you did not get to see enough from their point of view but when she was on screen she was very good. Imogen Poots was the pict witch that the romans encounter.

Overall this film was a lot of fun with some good bloody battle scenes and some good character development, the only major flaw was that there were too many characters and they could not all get enough screen time so you were left wondering about some of them. Overall though this is 4 star goodness that i will watch again in the future.

The Descent Part 2 (2009)

*Spoilers for The Descent* My review of the first film here.

The follow up to the Neil Marshall film about the caving females, firstly I do not think that this film was needed and if they had to remake it then why not ask Marshall to come back and do it again? Anyway this is the point that they had to decided which ending to go with and they went with the one that brought the Shauna MacDonald character to the surface. The British version finishes with the fact that she imagined her escape and this for me was a mistake but then it is a film I did not think needed to be made.

Saying that I went in looking for the same sort of tension that Marshall had been able to craft in his original film, it was not there to the same level there were to many strange decisions. For some reason the Shauna MacDonald character while almost comatose was dragged back into the caves and while it only happened a couple of days previously she could not remember what had happened. So you have a lot of plot points to get you where you need to go and overall I actually enjoyed it. There was a nice twist at the end that was fun and a couple of surprises through the middle which were good.

This is a 3 star film that did not need to be made and they could have gone a different direction which I think could have worked a bit better but overall if you enjoy the first then the second is worth seeing.

The Descent (2005)

This is Neil Marshall's 2005 Caving horror film that sees a group of experienced thrill seekers venture into a cave, they also have some other issues on the go within the group which leads to some excellent tense scenes. The story takes them into the cave and when they discover that they are lost and the claustrophobic atmosphere that Marshall creates is terryifying. I have to say that the group of cavers are all female and this makes it an interesting dynamic but I do not think it defines the terror it just happens to be a group of female cavers.

The effects are good as most of the scenes are in darkness and therefore you can forgive a lot but what you do see is done really well, I have seen this film a couple of times and the performances from the lead actors is very good. One downside I have heard is that there are 2 endings a UK one and a US one, this bothers me somewhat as this means that the 2 films are almost completly different to each other as the conclusion a lot of the time is what makes a film and it does part of the way in this film.

Overall I really enjoy this film there are some really good scares and scenes in it and it is well worth watching, a solid 4 star rating for me.