Fridae

The Roman empire was unrivalled in its long golden age, steadily assimilating weaker powers via conquest and diplomacy. But like all military empires, it too had its embarrassing moments – such as when a minor bureaucrat lost 3 entire legions of soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest. The Roman Empire never expanded further east till it recovered their eagle standards very much later.

The Eagle, however, is not about these slaughtered legions or missing eagles for it is based on the bestselling Eagles of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. More historical fantasy than anything else (but considered ‘probable’ by the research of 50 years ago), The Eagle concerns itself with a single legion that seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth when it ventured into Scotland - a military misadventure that sets the northern boundary for the empire.

20 years on, Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum; She’s the Man, Step Up), the son of the missing legion’s also missing commander, is determined to follow the family’s military tradition, retrieve the eagle standards, and restore the honour of father and family. In this long trek across England and Scotland, he will be helped by Esca (Jamie Bell; Billy Elliot), a Pictish slave whose loyalty and oaths may not hold past Hadrian’s Wall.

The screenplay by Jeremy Brock presents the film as a colonial adventure/buddy film which could have been set say in Africa with an upper class twit and his native slave or even in modern Afghanistan with a naive American GI and a local tribesman. On one hand, there is the tension between coloniser and colonised; on the other, a series of challenges that may provide enough male bonding and trust building to transcend that divide.

What makes The Eagle stand out from insipid sword and sandal epics or even the the very generic Centurion from last year, is the excellent directing by Kevin Macdonald. The former documentary filmmaker imposes his previous training and technique to create a relentless landscape populated by very believable savage warriors similar to the ones we would see in a National Geographic special. If Hadrian had thought that Scotland was the end of the known world, Kevin Macdonald would have you agree with that as well.