Barbarian Weekend

Ms. Spenser felt like rewatching The Northman, and I liked the idea. I mentioned Centurion, which she didn't remember watching. So we had the start of a barbarian weekend. 

I decided we should finish up with Boudica (2023), which would be a new one for us. It fits, in that we watched these three movies in descending order of quality. 

Olga Kurylenko is Boudica, wife of a small-time king (Clive Standen) in Roman-occupied England. They live under the heel of the Romans, but pay tribute and keep their heads down, and life is fine. Boudica and her two daughters enjoy going to the Roman town for hairdos, makeup and shopping. They go into the shady market outside the walls, for a bargain on blue cloth, and she discovers that the peasantry regard her as a mythical queen. This embarrasses her and also endangers her - the people might even worship her above the emperor, Nero.

When she explains this to her husband, he mentions a few legends and gives her a legendary bronze sword. But the new Roman governor has orders from Nero to crack down on the English, and in particular, women in roles of power. As a result, the Romans kill the king and have her and her daughters flogged.

She wakes up in the care of her fellow Britons, in great pain. She begs to see her daughters, and they are finally brought to her safe and sound. And so she goes from Romanized trophy queen to painted up warrior queen. Her subjects treat her like a goddess, and she brings her daughters with her into battle. because she figures out that they are actually dead, and she is only seeing ghosts. They actually use them for mystical battle advice.

Now, this isn't a great movie. I like Olga Kurylenko, and she does a fine job here. But the script isn't great, and the production values aren't either (without being terrible). It suffers in comparison to Centurion, which had amazing action, and also Kurylenko as the evil native tracker. It also seemed to do a lot more with a low budget. Of course, The Northman is a fantastic movie, and I liked it even more the second time. I hadn't really clocked Eggers use of long tracking shots and the amount of music and dance rituals in it. But I guess Boudica wasn't really trying to be either of those. Director Jesse V. Johnsom seems to specialize in direct-to-streaming action, and as such, it was perfectly adequate.

But, since it comes from the same Tacitus histories as Centurion, I was sorry that they didn't use the old "roll flaming stuff onto the Romans when they are stuck in a narrow ravine" trick. It should show up in more movies.