Went to see The Eagle last night. The film stars Channing Tatum as a Roman commander who requests to be stationed at the farthest north outpost of the Roman Empire in Britain. The plot revolves around Marcus Aquila (Tatum) trying to retrieve a golden emblem that his father lost to the native Britons years earlier.
The film is marketed as a heroic quest by a young man trying to restore his family's honor. I like this premise. For whatever reason, appealing to a person's sense of loyalty and honor has a way of touching him or her at a very deep level.
Unfortunately, the film failed to spring that reservoir of emotion--at least for me.
The acting wasn't foul; Tatum and Jamie Bell did a decent job of portraying their characters and I was able to hold my willing suspension of disbelief and buy into their characters as a young Roman-trained military man and a wild, crafty Briton, respectively.
Equally, the cinematography accomplished its goal of showing me what 2nd century Britain could have looked like. I most enjoyed the contrast of light and darkness that the D.P. used throughout the overextended 114 minutes.
In the end, though, I had two major cattle with this movie (having two beefs couldn't encapsulate my frustration). First, the writing made me want to shave my head the old fashioned way: by pulling my hair out. I couldn't even get a sense of the writers TRYING to make the story an emotional one, and in this type of film, if my heart isn't in it, I'd rather be at home washing the dishes. I lost count of the number of times I got ready to tear up because I knew the relationship between master and slave was going to be strengthened or taken to a new level, and just when I was ready to feel my heart strings pull ... nothing. Worse than nothing. They didn't even try to make the scenes touching, they merely wrote a "thank you" line of dialogue and moved to the next scene.
There was one scene toward the end that did actually attempt to elicit an emotion by killing off a character, but said character was so underdeveloped that I felt no attachment to him whatsoever.
My other cattle is with the directing. I have not seen any of Kevin Macdonald's other works, so I hate to broadly stroke him here, but it didn't seem as if he asked anything of his crew. The director, really, is responsible for it all, so perhaps I shouldn't have been so hard on the writers (actually, as a writer, yes, I should have been; they knew better). As I said earlier, the acting wasn't bad, but it also didn't sparkle. Macdonald should have been pushing the actors to new heights, but instead, it appeared that the actors were just having fun and going at their own pace, especially Donald Sutherland who has worked with some of the most talent directors in the industry and has certainly given magnificent performances in the past.
I walked away with the sense that Macdonald simply couldn't keep a tight ship and propel his crew to perform over and beyond the status quo.
All that being said, this is far from the worst film I've seen this year and I am quite positive it will not be the worst going forward. I think the problem is that in a historical, epic film in the vein of Gladiator and Braveheart one MUST be able to stir the audience's emotions. Do not settle for having a good looking film; if it doesn't bring me to tears, pursue a different genre.
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