Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Last Legion!

Mid Aryan of 460 AD (colourised).

2007's The Last Legion has a twist ending that you will probably guess, but in case you want to see it fresh, avoid reading anything about it since even the tagline on the second-hand DVD I got of it gives it away.

You stream capeslop on your neighbour's Net Flix password; I imbibe kino on a busted DVD player held shut by an elastic band. We are not the same.

Loosely based on a book and looselier based on allegedly real events and persons, The Last Legion takes place in the 5th Century AD (not "CE"; get back in the locker), where Odoacer (Peter Mullen), unsatisfied with the Danegeld lavished upon him by the crumbling western Roman empire, sacks Rome (in reality it was Ravenna) and captures the boy-emperor Romulus Augustus (Thomas Brodie-Sangster).

Me to my bathroom mirror, ages 5-present (colourised).

Though this flick clearly has zero aspirations to contemporary relevance, this period in history is more worthy of scrutiny than anything on your high school curriculum. Machiavelli wrote of how the empire's overreliance on its foederati cadres - mostly Germanics - led to its inevitable dissolution, but today we're assured replacing purged chuds in the US military with illegal aliens is a good idea, so what did he know?

"O Caesar, the barbarians are at the gates!"
"Well, don't be a biggot - let them in!"
-from the Dialogues of Lapis Iactare

Odoacer would happily whack the young emperor and be done with it but finds himself talked out of it by Ambrosinus (Sir Ben Kingsley), the boy's enigmatic tutor and protector, and instead sends both to an island fortress while he sets about wrangling the senate. This gives heroes Ambrosius Aurelianus (Colin Firth) and Mira (Aishwarya Rai) scope to stage a daring rescue, in the course of which the young Caesar discovers his ancestor Julius's sword, because it was just there. You can bewail the contrivance of this all you like, but it saves time, and the sequence is fun.

To effect the rescue, Rai steals this random fisherman's boat by yeeting him in the water. This cracks me up because she could have just asked.

The fates of the historical Romulus and the titular Ninth Legion remain obscure to history, so the movie combines them with the pleasingly neat premise that our heroes set off to Britannia to enlist the aid of the long-missing legionnaires. You'd think the long trek through mainland Europe would chew up most of the runtime, but you'd be wrong, as it's glossed over in a few dissolves of what are presumably meant to be the Alps.

"Remember when they climbed the mountain in Lord of the Rings?" - Dino de Laurentiis

Sure, The Last Legion is derivative of every sword-and-sandals flick you've ever seen, hobbles along on a budget dwarfed by the Jackson Tolkien films and Troy, and seems rushed and first-drafty, but it's one of the last honest entertainment vehicles ever to emerge from Hollywood. Like Showdown in Little Tokyo, it could actually use more fat, as character dynamics are almost ascetically undernourished. There's a sword-swapping motif that provides milestones in the bonding journey between Firth and Brodie-Sangster, but it's so perfunctory the payoff underwhelms, while the buddy sidekick duo of Demetrius and Batiatus(?) are defined almost solely by a single scene where they arm-wrestle. On the other hand, I don't care, because it's fun to spend time in a world of historical fanfic, and there are charming little hints of character among the noise, like this moment where little Caesar tries it on with Rai:

This look right here where she contemplates where those blve eyes came from ain't acting. Low caste bros, it's over.

That the grand finale pales next to the spectacle of Helm's Deep or the Kalekeya battle in Baahubali only really shows how spoiled we've become. That it takes place in the under-exploited atmospherics of foggy pre-medieval Albion gives it mythopoetic resonance to spare.

I will not rest until menhirpunk is a genre.