10 Terrible Films By Game Of Thrones Directors

Director: Neil Marshall

In 2014 Neil Marshall was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for his directorial work on Game Of Thrones season 4's penultimate episode The Watchers On The Wall, but four years earlier his latest (and still most recent) major feature film wasted a talented cast and an interesting premise, much like the disappointing Doomsday did two years before that.

Like most of his film work, Centurion is set in Britain, this time during the Roman conquest of the 2nd Century. It stars Michael Fassbender as Quintus Dias, a Roman centurion who leads a group of soldiers in a rescue raid on a Pict camp. While the Roman invaders manage to secure their captured general, they find themselves hunted by a group of the Pict's most vicious and skilled warriors.

Like Fassbender's debut film 300, Centurion takes its ancient context and uses it as little more than a vague guideline, being far more interested in setting up scenes of mass bloodshed than in maintaining historical accuracy. Heads roll with such regularity that the film becomes nothing more than a series of violent skirmishes broken up with hackneyed speeches about duty and honour that, while intended to inspire, only evoke memories of better movies in the historical action genre.

The jarring modern vernacular and misjudged use of comical voice-overs prove to be the final nails in the coffin here, and no matter how many shots of breathtaking Scottish landscapes Marshall includes, he can't hide the fact that the story is sub-standard and fails to capitalise on a fantastic setting.