The Eagle is a buddy movie in sandals. It comes with swords and breastplates, too. And fog and mud as well. Set in Britain, at the time when the Romans were the occupying force, it looks like Braveheart without the massed battles, but it still has all the rain and the mist. It has lots of action but the action beats only come between very, very long talk scenes, where the actors bang on a lot about honour and dignity. What The Eagle doesn’t have is a powerful personality of its own; the whole thing seems so 'seen before’ it’s distracting, like watching deleted scenes from HBO’s Rome or any of the recent post-Gladiator sword and sandal pics like last year’s Centurion (the plot of which bares a resemblance to some the details here). It’s simplistic, handsome looking and so earnest it’s stone dead, well before the first blade arcs the air to send pretty sprays of blood skyward.
That sinking feeling, the kind that insists that one ought to take what follows with the utmost seriousness (as a matter of faith, rather than a matter of elegant and dramatic seduction), begins in The Eagle with a long series of on screen titles that explain the backstory of the movie. The said titles are done in a script form that reminded me a lot of bedtime story books or the bible, and are against a screen filled with rolling mist and a soundtrack full of grim resolve. This is certainly Gladiator territory, but on a smaller budget and with Channing Tatum. At least Ridley Scott, a famously humourless director, had the good taste to give Russell Crowe a few gags. Here director Kevin MacDonald has Tatum play the one dour note, the whole way through. That might have been ok if there were characters and beats that lighten the movie’s bleak mood, but the whole thing is so relentlessly sour – it’s no fun at all. Still, to be fair the thematic material – shame and commitment to an ideal – arguably doesn’t immediately give itself up for a facile treatment where one can intrude guiltlessly. Perhaps the movie’s high tone and low watt drama can be attributed to its source, The Eagle of the Ninth, a children’s novel from 1954 written by Rosemary Sutcliffe.
Tatum plays Marcus a Roman commander who hopes to redeem his family name. As those opening titles explained, it seems Marcus’ old man led 5,000 men into the wilds of Britain only to have them disappear and their standard, a gold eagle, a symbol of their honour and courage identifying them as Roman. (And by implications as the story would have it, world beaters and world leaders.) This humiliating defeat, so says the movie, led to Hadrian building his wall across Britain. No Roman would go into the North where the fierce barbarous Brits wear paint and have enough athletic chops to out pace a horse at full gallop.
By the end of the first half hour Marcus has proven himself in battle, which redeems him a bit, at least in the eyes of his men, if not Rome, but he wants the whole mojo. When by chance he meets a brave slave Esca (Jamie Bell), Marcus in effect finds an ally to lead him beyond the wall and into Caledonia where it’s 'said" that the Eagle looms large in the lives of the triumphant locals"¦
Most of the second part of the movie deals with how the slave and the master come to owe the ultimate debt to the other – that is to say their very lives. The adventure moves into predictable territory; together they heal old wounds and restore order. Aside from the obvious symbolism in this pairing of conquered and conqueror it affords MacDonald some of his few interesting scenes; when, once the buddies reach deep into the highlands, and encounter a particularly savage tribe, it looks like Esca has turned on his old master, it’s the chance for the director to sketch a complex portrait of these 'barbarians’ (in subtitles no less).
Well, nearly complex; the tribe do end up as the 'bad guys’ but it’s nice to see MacDonald and co. try to engage with the characters on their own terms, no matter how compromised the portrayal is ultimately. The future of Britain lies in the likes of Esca, with his faith in reconciliation and honour, you see, so it wouldn’t do to get into too much politics and cultural specifics"¦
The cast struggle: there’s something very American mid-western about Tatum. His accent is slippery and he wears his costumes with that vacant air of a lad playing dress-up. You can almost see his thought bubble: 'Ok, I look silly in this, right?" Bell is ok but no matter what, he looks like he belongs in a grit-Brit flick about bovver boys. Donald Sutherland turns up as Marcus’ uncle in a costume that looks like geriatric sleepwear and for purposes that seem strictly expositional. Only Mark Strong, the great Brit actor seems to have some grip on the kind of picture he’s in; he plays an old survivor of the Eagle’s Ninth battalion.
MacDonald is a tremendous talent; his docs One Day in September (2000), for which he won an Oscar, and Touching the Void (2003) were models of dramatic construction and storytelling. His first eature The Last of King of Scotland (2006) was clever, and subtle. But this and State of Play (2009) seem like exercises in form; they’re juvenilia, but without the richness that the best genre movies always have.
