This is another complete mess of a story about the Boudica rebellion. This time Kurylenko takes on the role and for me I think she may be a slight improvement over Alex Kingston in that she's at least given some character development and something to grow into. The film though actually manages to feel very rushed so that her transition from noble high-born lady to insurgent and warrior queen feels very abrupt. I did though find her at least convincing in the early scenes and I thought she was able to pull off the early role with some style and convey that sense of intelligence, dignity and understanding that surely a Queen of this time would have needed. The opening scene is actually okay featuring an artistic approach with good use of light and shadow as roman soldiers march past us, there's atmosphere and mystery to it and it's a shame the rest of the film doesn't convey that. One of the first major clangers quickly lands though with a prophecy that the romans will be thrown out of Britain by a powerful female leader. Nero reacting to this immediately decrees no woman may hold a position of power, lighting the fuse for what then follows. Total bunk but this film is only just getting started. We spend some time now with Boudica and I must say her very small tribe, why are there only about 10 people around? Where is everyone? That would have been about one family back then. Anyway they live in a somewhat privileged position, and tutor their daughters in Latin, she has access to makeup and expensive clothing so it's not a bad life it seems. One scene though that bothered me had some rather modern looking windows placed behind her. In another historical clanger we see British Christians being arrested and punished, the persecutions of Nero are unlikely to have reached Britan where the romans had appeared only 10 years before, it doesn't work. We get a quick introduction to a female warrior character dressed up to look like something from the suicide squad. As you'd expect the Brits are portrayed as warm, humble, straight forward and decent, the romans are greedy, cruel and violent. The flogging scene is quite violent but also quick. The film makes a strange choice in changing the fate of her two daughters and it's just baffling really why they do this other than to do some kind of strange Sixth Sense like scenes. Some of the acting I thought just wasn't that good from the roman characters. In another scene perhaps intended to rip off King Arthur she retrieves a magic sword from a lake, this sword even flies into her hand on command, like something out of Thor, it's such a laughably bad choice and perhaps shows how infantilised audiences have become now that the writers felt they couldn't tell this story without a magic sword flying around like it's Harry Potter or something. By this point the film is now in desperate trouble and struggling to save itself from becoming an outright joke. Things do improve though, a few scenes are either nicely edited, or you may just think they are saving on money, but we have her slap on the war paint and transform into the insurgent queen ready to take on the roman forces. The sack of a couple of towns is competently done much better than the 2003 version which showed them mainly attacking about 10 romans behind a piece of wood. There's a little internal power struggle going on within her camp but not enough, they really should have showed how hard she had to work to keep the different tribes with her. We do though get the odd scene of various male Brits doubting her and so on. I must say the dialogue was fairly bad, the ghost children showing up to tell her whatever she needed to know was especially bad. The history isn't even close to being accurate in large part, Nero did not kill himself because of the revolt, no writer has ever suggested that and the dates do not match at all. Nor was a new force landed in Britain to put down the rebellion. The final battle is a real disappointment, not even close to what really happened, why does she only have 40 warriors with her too for the final battle. Unlike the historical Boudica this one goes down fighting in the end. What I still couldn't get my head around though was all the mystic mumbo jumbo we were forced to sit through before getting there. Some of the fight sequences had a hard violent edge to them which was good but it's never explained how she goes from high born noblewoman to natural killer in just 2 minutes, it's in her blood I suppose. The film presents a pretty one-sided perspective to the story, not that this is a bad thing but it would have been interesting to understand a bit more about how the romans tried to respond. Again her speeches fall pretty flat, and some of the dialogue is awkward. The history is poor in parts with her army at the end largely picked off by archery before we are treated to a mixture of Bormir's death in LOTR and Butch Casidy. They even try and pull a
Gladiator at the end with this idea now she's actually delighted to be able to go off and join her family in the afterlife. It's like the final nail in the coffin for this and an idea of just how inaccurate and lazy it was in how it was put together. A shame because I do love a story set in this time, some of the costumes were quite well done and the cinematography, editing and fight sequences were probably the best part about it. So in the end an ever so slight improvement over the 2003 with it's almost comical Zeena/Merlin approach to things, combined with a flat and stale look. This at least improves over that, yet still it's grossly inaccurate and muddled none the less. I will say too that having an all-white cast is not an easy thing to do now in 2023, but it gives it a kind of authenticity getting rarer now.
Review of Boudica: Queen of War
