The Eagle (2011)

The Eagle arrives in 2011 with a shield, a slave, and no interest whatsoever in the cultural conversations of its moment. Kevin Macdonald directs this adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 adventure novel with a straight face and a grim sense of duty, following a Roman centurion north of Hadrian's Wall to recover a lost golden emblem. Channing Tatum plays Marcus with the stoic vacancy of a man who has been told to stand near a horse. Jamie Bell fares better as Esca, the Brigantes slave whose loyalty provides the film's only emotional current.

The picture is, by the standards of modern classification, remarkably bare. The cast is white to a man, with Tahar Rahim's Seal Prince the single conspicuous exception, and no discernible agenda attends the choices. Women barely appear. The slavery that structures the Marcus and Esca relationship is rendered as period furniture, an arrangement of antiquity rather than a prompt for contemporary reflection. There is no environmental sermon, no economic grievance, no meditation on bodies or minds that deviate from a Roman norm. What the film offers instead is honor, loyalty, and mud.

Macdonald has spoken of using American accents for the Romans to evoke the Iraq War, a gesture so discreet that most viewers will miss it entirely. The Ninth Legion's disappearance remains a genuine historical puzzle, but the film treats it as a premise for adventure, not a thesis to argue. It shows, it does not lecture. The result is a relic of an older mode of filmmaking, one that assumes an audience wants spectacle and a brisk march, not instruction. We are left with a competent, somewhat glum epic, and the distinct impression that nobody involved was trying to say anything at all.