The Eagle (2011)


Sword and sandal movies have not been popular since the 1950s despite the anomaly that was Gladiator.  However, everyone loves a good mystery, and 1900 years later there is still some question about what happened to the Ninth Legion.  Whether they were slaughtered in an ill-fated incursion into northern Britain or eventually disbanded or moved to mainland Europe is up for debate and may never be answered.  However, Rosemary Sutcliff gave us a fictional account of what may have happened to them in her 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth.  Adapted by Jeremy Brock and directed by Kevin Macdonald, The Eagle is a mostly forgotten low-budget version of the book, but it manages to outshine some of its contemporaries.

Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) is the son of a commander of the Ninth Legion who requests a post in Britain 20 years after their disappearance in order to help redeem the family name.  He quickly earns the respect of his fellow soldiers in battle but is wounded in an attempt to rescue a patrol that he sent out to locate a missing supply train.  After recuperating at the house of his uncle (Donald Sutherland) Marcus, now honorably discharged, becomes restless.  

Marcus saves a slave named Esca (Jamie Bell) from death and, after hearing that the eagle standard of the Ninth Legion is rumored to be in the hands of a Celtic tribe in the north, decides to reclaim it.  Using Esca as a guide and translator he makes his way north of Hadrian's wall and, along the way, finds out what happened to the missing legion as well his father. 

While supposedly taking place in Scotland a majority of The Eagle was filmed in Hungary to save costs.  Also, despite being PG-13, it pushes the limits of the rating pretty far at a time when most films of that type were rather anemic.  There is no love interest, just the basic drive to restore honor to his name.

That, and the fact that Tatum does such a good job at making Marcus more than a one-note character, is why I liked this.  I think it does have quite a few faults, one being that it gets rushed toward the end, but the dynamic between Marcus and Esca is solid despite following a well-worn path.  The action scenes are well done and not as jumbled as other action films of the time.  Despite the speculative nature of it all it does appear there were some attempts in set design to try and be a bit more accurate with Roman life.

The problem is that it is a good movie that never really rises to becoming great.  Same could be said for Gladiator, to be honest, as Ridley Scott relied on spectacle and the hope that everyone would see his film as a modern Spartacus.  The Eagle is more interested in telling a different story with a fraction of the budget, but audiences were no more interested in seeing it than they were in seeing Centurion the year before, which was another movie that dealt with what happened with the Ninth.  

The Eagle (2011)
Time: 114 minutes
Starring: Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Donald Sutherland
Director: Kevin Macdonald

 

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