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The Last Legion Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense action violence) Genre: Action, Historical Theater release: August 17, 2007 by the Weinstein Co. Directed by: Doug Lefler Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes Cast: Thomas Sangster (Romulus Augustus), Colin Firth (Aurelius), Ben Kingsley (Ambrosinus), Aishwarya Rai (Mira), Peter Mullan (Odoacer), Kevin McKidd (Wulfila), John Hannah (Nestor), Alexander Siddig (Theodorus Andronikos), Robert Pugh (Kustennin), James Cosmo (Hrothgar), Harry Van Gorkum (Vortgyn) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

They say there's a kernel of fact behind every legend, and every now and then a film comes along that tries to pull back the curtain on a popular tale by imagining what might have "really" happened way back when. Several years ago, The 13th Warrior suggested the Beowulf stories were inspired by an encounter between Vikings and a mysterious tribe in northern Europe. More recently, King Arthur re-cast the famed English king as a Roman military officer who stuck around in the British Isles.

The Last Legion continues in that tradition by pushing Arthurian legend even further back into Roman history—but as with all these speculative tales, the fact that the legends have been dressed up in historical garb does not make the new stories any less bogus. In fact, if anything, the historical details become a distraction.

Aishwarya Rai as Mira, Colin Firth as Aurelius

Take the opening narration, which tells us that a special sword (can you guess which one?) was acquired by the Roman dictator Julius Caesar and inherited by "the last of his line," the Emperor Tiberius. It's not entirely clear what this means, since Tiberius—who was adopted by Augustus, who in turn was adopted by Julius Caesar—was actually the second of five emperors in that dynasty. So how was Tiberius "the last of his line" if he was neither a genetic descendant nor the last ruler in that family?

Things get even more pointlessly erroneous when the story proper begins. A subtitle tells us the story is set in Rome in A.D. 460, but it revolves around a boy named Romulus Augustus (Thomas Sangster) who most historians regard as the last of the Roman emperors—and who, in fact, was actually elevated to the emperor's throne, while still a young teen, in A.D. 475. (Incidentally, the capital city of the Western Roman Empire at this point was no longer Rome, but had been a city called Ravenna for several decades.)

And there are much bigger anachronisms. An evil masked tyrant in Britannia named Vortgyn (Harry Van Gorkum) lives in a splendidly huge castle that could not have existed before the medieval era, while the Romans go about their affairs as though they still lived in the first century. With the possible exception of a tiny cross on the emperor's crown, there is not a hint of the fact that the bulk of the Empire had converted to Christianity over a century before. Instead, Romulus is told at his coronation that he is joining "the immortals," and he openly wonders if he is now "a god or a boy."

Romulus (Thomas Sangster) with Aurelius, Mira, and Ambrosinus (Ben Kingsley)

Perhaps I am nit-picking, but movies that lay claim to some sort of historical basis do invite this kind of scrutiny—and truth be told, part of the fun of watching junky would-be epics such as The Last Legion is coming home to an encyclopedia or search engine afterwards and looking up what the movie got right and what it didn't.

The blatant errors wouldn't be so bad, though, if movies like these at least had some of the entertainment value that we associate with the legends that supposedly inspired these films. As it is, The Last Legion follows an obvious Arthurian template, but without capturing any of the magic of an actual Arthurian folk tale.

Romulus is the boy who would be king, and in fact, when we first see him, before his coronation, he is mistaken for a street thief by Aurelius (Colin Firth), a soldier who has just returned to Rome after several years away and is unfamiliar with the current royal family. In this, we have a dim, distant echo of the stories in which the young Arthur served as a knight's humble squire before his royalty was revealed.

Aurelius and Mira, with their backs against the wall

There is also a Merlin figure in Ambrosinus (Ben Kingsley), a "philosopher" who acts as the boy's mentor and performs a few magic tricks—though he doesn't do anything that can't be explained away as the work of good reflexes, sleight-of-hand and theatrical staging. It is striking, actually, how the film keeps reminding us that Ambrosinus is an illusionist who merely tricks people into thinking that he has supernatural powers. If we can't take him seriously as a Gandalf-like wizard—if, indeed, we have been shown that he is adept at deceiving people—then why should we believe anything that he might have to say about "destiny" and the like?

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