[film] The Eagle

[tamaranth]

The Eagle [IMDB]
Long-awaited film of based on Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, one of my favourite books.

Good stuff
- Beautifully shot, with a spare and subtle soundtrack. (I didn't especially love the music but it didn't get in the way.)
- fight scenes rough, dirty, nasty and compact.
- increasing sense of menace, of hidden eyes, as they journey into the north. This isn't a camping trip: this is a meandering journey through enemy territory.

Ungood stuff
- Black-and-white morality: Romans good, Britons bad. Even Esca. (The relationship between Marcus and Esca is quite different from that in the book.)
- American accents everywhere. I think it was only the Roman characters who had noticeable American accents, so this may have been a deliberate decision: still, it really grated.
- Jamie Bell's features are too refined for an Iron Age Briton. He has a face that makes me think of centuries of aristocratic inbreeding.
- no Cottia. (In fact, I don't think there were any women with speaking roles.)

I did enjoy it, despite those issues. I imagine it would have been a very different, and more suspenseful, experience if I hadn't been familiar with the book. Also, I'd heard that there was strong homoerotic subtext (so, just like the book then) but actually it felt less so than the original novel.

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I thought casting the Romans in Britain as regime-change accented Americans was a atroke of brilliance - but YMMV.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

ps pretty sure it was deliberate. The Britons don;t speak American and apparently their own tongue in the film is authentic Gaelic.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Yup, casting was deliberate. I liked it, apart from some really obvious political dialogue.