Centurion is a 2010 British historical action film written and directed by Neil Marshall,[2] loosely based on the disappearance of the Roman Empire's Ninth Legion in Caledonia in the early second century AD.

The Picts engage in guerrilla warfare against the Romans along the Glenblocker forts and the Gask Ridge at the southern border of the Scottish Highlands.

At the Roman outpost of Pinnata Castra, Pict warriors led by Vortix and Aeron kill the entire garrison, taking only the second-in-command, Centurion Quintus Dias, because he can speak the Pictish language.

He dispatches the Ninth Legion under General Titus Flavius Virilus to eradicate the Pict threat, providing him with a Celtic Brigantian scout, Etain.

The few survivors – Dias, the legionaries Bothos, Thax, Brick, Macros and Leonidas, and the cook Tarak – set out to rescue Virilus, finding him at Gorlacon's village.

The next morning, Gorlacon burns his son's body on a funeral pyre and forces Virilus to fight Etain, who as a child witnessed her parents raped and slaughtered by the Romans; she kills him with a spear through the heart.

Gorlacon sends her after the legionaries at the head of a group of mounted warriors, including Vortix and Aeron, to avenge his son's death.

Dias and Brick raid the enemy camp, killing two men and wounding a third, who reveals they are being pursued because of the death of Gorlacon's son, which Thax had kept secret.

Dias, Bothos, and Brick find the forest hut of Arianne, an exiled Briton accused of witchcraft who learned Latin from a nearby Roman outpost.

Fearful of his reputation being tainted by a military failure, he decides the Ninth Legion's fate should remain a mystery and Dias must be silenced.

In a recent book,[5] Dr Miles Russell of Bournemouth University observes that there is strong evidence for a catastrophic British war resulting in the annihilation of the legion early in the reign of Hadrian.

The website's critical consensus reads, "It's a bloody geyser of Neil Marshall's typically stylish B-movie action, but Centurion is too focused on hacking and slashing to deliver original dialogue or interesting characters.

[14] The Birmingham Post gave the film two stars out of five saying "this hideously violent, formula one chase movie lacks the novelty of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto".