Adventure, 114 Minutes, 2011
This is exactly the kind of movie I love, so it’s hard to be completely objective about it. It’s got fighting and swords and honor and mud and fighting and horses and friendship and more fighting. If you like those things, you’ll like this. There’s not much more to say.
One thing that struck me about the movie was the choice that any movie like this must make: how do people talk? Basically there are two options: talk “normally” and risk destroying the sense of time and place or insert “authentic” dialog and risk alienating the audience. (Of course the third option – make everybody talk in a British accent – is also an option I suppose.)
This movie goes the first route: the romans talk like American soldiers. In a few scenes if you close your eyes you could easily mistake this for a Vietnam era flick. Once we get into Northern Britain everybody starts speaking Welsh with sub-titles so it’s less jarring, but until then it does have some awkward moments. It never really detracts from the film but you’d think a movie like this would look at the great success of HBO’s “Rome” or the two amazing “Spartacus” series on Starz and take a page from them.
