The Roads and Countrysides ... Littered with Shrines!

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Centurion (2010, Neil Marshall) [61]

Centurion, along with the following year's Season of the Witch - the return of the B-movie? I don't think I'll ever be on board with Marshall's brand of relentless violence, but narrative-wise I see where he's going. Michael Fassbender plays a soldier during the period where the Roman empire was expanding into Britain and fighting the Picts. He is stationed near the frontier and his outpost is attacked by the Picts, who slaughter everyone but keep him alive to pump him for information. Rome sends in the 9th legion to address the issue, and Fassbender meets up with them after escaping. Not long after they are ambushed by the Picts and lose almost all of their men, including the general. The remaining troops band together and head north to rescue the general. They fail, but kill several Picts during their sneak attack, including their leader's son. Angered, the leader sends a skilled band of Picts to track the remnants of the legion and bring back their heads. During the chase, both sides suffer casualties, and there is a point where the three remaining legionnaires hide in the custody of a Pict witch, played by Imogen Heap. Accused of witchcraft, the Picts physically scarred her face to mark her as such before banishing her. Though most of the tracking / chase scenes aren't terribly useful or captivating, this is an important parallel the film re-addresses later.

The three men return to the outpost only to find that in their absence, Roman leaders issued orders for the other legions to withdraw behind Hadrian's Wall. The band of Picts corner them in the outpost and attack. Fassbender and another man survive, losing only one while slaying the Pict huntress Etain and her cohorts. In a clumsy scene, the other man dies when Fassbender returns to the Roman camp, shot by soldiers because he is not wearing the armor that identifies his nationality; the metaphor of this scene is that Rome is an empire in decline because they no longer recognize humans as individuals, but only as members of a nationality. The Roman leaders welcome Fassbender home as a hero, but secretly plot to have him killed in order to conceal the truth about their unsuccessful venture into northern Britain. Fassbender survives the assassination attempt and leaves in exile, to rejoin the witch.

The subtext here addresses politics, both national and individual. Roman leaders condemn Fassbender because the empire has expanded far and wide, but they fear uprising if word of their failed conquest reaches the new territories. Their decision is counter-intuitive because countries are intangible entities - aggregates of the actions and values of their citizens - that expand when individual prosperity is widespread. Yet here it is the sacrifice of the individual that is fueling Rome's conquest. It is fitting that Fassbender returns to the witch because they are both people whose lives their countries deemed insignificant. The fate of the Roman empire is no secret; this union formed by Fassbender and the witch during the dénouement of Centurion is gesture - a small-scale look at the process by which great nations fall and humans create new ones in their place.

Bitch Slap (2010, Rick Jacobson) [11]

On one hand Bitch Slap is a tale of post-feminism, where three women double cross one another during a diamond heist. One is manly and aggressive while another is feminine and diplomatic, while another is a hybrid. The feminine one plays possum but we learn at the end she's actually the ringleader, influencing the others. (Cue quote from Sun Tzu about using deception during war.) Thus, the eponymous bitch slap is directed at society where women struggle to emulate brute-force male power at the expense of female power - manipulation. Hence the gratuitous fan service - literally a way of putting women back to earlier times, as traditional female wisdom would not fight tooth-and-nail against objectification, but rather see it as one of many weapons in their arsenal of subterfuge. And then on the other hand, Bitch Slap is a complete travesty - a journey following three undeveloped characters - sets of ass-tits-face who arbitrarily operate within a very vague ring of organized crime, navigate a million asinine plot twists involving a bunch of irrelevant sideshow freaks (to think, I had almost forgotten the Tourettes fad), topped off by sloppy CGI and lame off-off-off-Hollywood dialogue. Not a hard choice, but - your move Yugi.