Month: February 2011

In 120 A.D., as Rome sought to expand it’s empire to the North and the West, they encountered sizable resistance from the Picts in Britain.  Seeking to take control, Rome’s Ninth Legion with 5,000 soldiers fell before the Picts, in disgrace to their country.

In the 20 years that have passed at the start of The Eagle, it’s been established that Rome had constructed a wall cutting off this region of Britain.  Now, the son of the general of the Ninth Legion, Marcus Flavius Aquila, seeks to regain his family’s honor by taking command of a small garrison near the wall. In a battle against a Pict tribe, Marcus’ troops hold back the tribe, though Marcus suffers from an injury that then has him honorably discharged from his command.

As Marcus recuperates, he manages to save the life of a Briton slave, Eska, during a gladiatorial battle.  And though Eska despises everything that Marcus stands for, he owes him his life and swears allegiance to him.  Marcus hears that the golden eagle standard that belonged to the Ninth has been seen in the possession of one of the Pict tribes, the Seals. Recovered from his injuries, Marcus seeks to take back the eagle, with Eska by his side.

That’s the basic premise of The Eagle, the new movie from director Kevin Macdonald who has previously helmed the films The Last King of Scotland and  State of Play, neither of which I’ve seen.  This is also the second recent movie to use the fall of the Ninth Legion as it’s centerpiece, the other being Neil Marshall’s last film, Centurion, but more about that later.

Overall, I thought that The Eagle wasn’t bad, but it doesn’t really do a whole lot to distinguish itself either.  It’s pace is very leisured and in some places is just a little laborious.  The film has a serviceable look to it which gets a little more impressive as we get further into Marcus’ and Eska’s journey.  The fight scenes aren’t bad, though they are tightly cut and shot close up.  They serve their purpose and nothing more.  The best part of the film is the relationship between Marcus and Eska, but even that is on the very dry side.

Channing Tatum plays Marcus and Jamie Bell plays Eska.  Both actors look terrific in their parts and they do their best with what they have here, with Bell’s intensity as the standout between the two.  Tatum does his best to garner sympathy for his character, but it doesn’t give you the rousing drive that you want out of something like this.  Still, for Tatum, this is pretty decent work.  Donald Sutherland plays Marcus’ uncle, who we see during Marcus’ recuperation period.  His performance, as is those of the other actors playing Romans, is very casual, which doesn’t quite give off the air of imperialism that you sort’ve want out of something like this.  From what I understand though, that was a decision on Kevin Macdonald’s part to sort of buck the trend of how we normally see Romans portrayed on film.  Mark Strong also briefly shows up in the movie as Guern, a former Ninth Legionnaire, who saw the futility of the Ninth’s battle and left to survive.  Strong’s almost unrecognizable when you see him, though it almost doesn’t matter as there’s not a whole lot done with him here.

The Eagle isn’t a bad movie, it’s just average.  The pieces are there to make this a rousing piece of entertainment, but it seems to me that director Macdonald is deliberately underplaying everything.  Why?  I don’t know, maybe to keep it more grounded in reality than anything else.  That may be the case, and at the same time clips The Eagle’s wings.

Now, I also mentioned Neil Marshall’s Centurion above and I just watched that before going to see The Eagle (it’s available in high definition on Netflix Instant Play).  Now, I’m already a fan of Marshall’s, his previous films Dog Soldiers and Doomsday are just a hell of a lot of fun, and The Descent was one of my top ten favorites for 2005.  Centurion, which is very much influenced by Walter Hill’s movie, The Warriors, delivers on just about every count.  It’s beautifully shot, the action scenes are spectacular, and the performances are absolutely terrific with standout work from lead Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko.  This wasn’t widely released theatrically which is a shame because it deserved to be seen on a big screen.  So basically, I offer that up as an alternative if you’re wanting to see a movie based around the fall of the Ninth Legion.  The Eagle is workmanlike and average, but Centurion soars.

Based on a true story, Sanctum tells the tale of a group of underwater cave divers as they attempt to explore one of the largest and least accessible cave settings on the planet, the Esa-ala caves in the South Pacific.  Thanks to an incredible storm coming their way, the team’s exit from the system is cut off, trapping the group of explorers and forcing them to navigate through the rest of the system to find an alternative way out.  The only question is whether they can survive the experience, now being totally cut of from the outside world and with limited supplies.

I actually like the idea of telling this sort of story, without having some sort of personified malevolent force that would be in pursuit of the team through their adventure, thinking of telling it like a dramatized National Geographic adventure.  The idea is cool, the execution on the other hand isn’t.

The main selling points of this movie are that James Cameron served as one of the producers of the film and that it was shot in 3D.  As the story unfolds, it certainly has a feel like a James Cameron film, with it’s stock group of expert characters in an impossible situation.  And if anyone could do 3D right, you’d certainly expect that from something with Cameron’s name on it.

I actually think the 3D is pretty good in the movie.  It’s not of the in-your-face variety, but more in giving real depth to it’s setting, and for the most part, Sanctum does this pretty well.

After that, well things just don’t fare too well.

From what I can tell, this is director Alister Grierson’s first major film, and while he does a nice job of initially setting up a sense of place here, it falls apart after that.  Once the event happens that traps the group, you should get a sense of just how arduous the journey is, not just by what they have to do to survive, but also by where they are and the elapsed time of their journey.  Near the start of the film, we have a nice little section shown as a computer graphic simulation which shows just how big this setting is, and I think it would’ve been nice to have somehow kept that as some sort of running piece that showed where this group was as they’re making their way through.  Instead, we just get things presented as a series of events that just happen, seemingly in real time.  In comparison, a movie like 127 Hours does a terrific job with a similar subject.  In just one setting, you get a portrayal of elapsed time and threat to the trapped Aron Ralston, and it totally captures the viewer, you feel Ralston’s journey.

It also helps that you actually like Ralston in 127 Hours, the characters in Sanctum are just stock one and two-dimensional cyphers for the most part. They run through the traditional motions, in particular with a tired father-son conflict between Frank, the leader of the expedition (he’s like the Cousteau of the cave diving world) and his son Josh, who just doesn’t want that life.  To their credit, I think actors Richard Roxburgh, who plays Frank, and Ioan Gruffudd, who plays his business partner, Carl, do their best to inject whatever life they can into their parts.  They’re just limited by a very ho-hum script.

Rhys Wakefield plays, Frank’s son Josh, and while he looks good, he has very little on-screen charisma.  He’s supposed to be our sympathetic point of view for the movie, but in the end, you just don’t care about him at all.  With a movie like this, you should be in there just rooting for this guy all the way through, much like you do with Aron Ralston in 127 Hours. Alice Parkinson plays Victoria, Carl’s fiancée and supposedly quite the explorer her own self.  As such, you would figure her to be a character with resources. As this script plays out, she devolves to being the  “girl” of this piece who in the end is more trouble than she’s worth.

One other comment about the script, this movie is rated R for language, some violence and disturbing images.  Well, I tend to think that the R Rating is more for language than anything else as this script has the tendency to drop quite a few F-bombs throughout.  Now, I’m not against that at all, and even applaud it when it’s in the hands of such guys like a David Mamet or Quentin Tarantino who know how to write profanity and make it profound in their use.  Here, while the screenwriters might argue that this is the way they really talk during one of these expeditions, it comes off more forced than anything else.  It plays like it’s from an inexperienced screenwriter who’s just wanting to make this material more adult so that he’s taken seriously, when really it’s totally unnecessary.

While it’s 3D is good, the material behind it isn’t and so the 3D is just a selling effect rather than being anything that really helps you in experiencing this journey.  I like the idea of making this sort of adventure movie, but it’s execution left me cold, filled with tedium more than anything that gives you a real sense of the danger that you should have.  I also like the idea of using a cast that’s not exactly household names (Gruffudd is the most famous here, having played Reed Richards in the two Fantastic Four movies), but that cast is wasted thanks to a script that makes the characters nothing more than placeholders rather than real people that you want to experience this journey through.

If you’re expecting a terrific journey here because of having James Cameron’s name on the project, you’re probably going to be better served by watching something like The Abyss again rather than paying the money to see Sanctum in theatres.  Already, we have an early contender for one of the most disappointing movies of 2011.