The Eagle of the Ninth Legion

After learning his craft primarily with documentaries, Kevin Macdonald has made an impressive feature directorial debut with "The Last King of Scotland". After the contemporary thriller "State of Play", Macdonald now moves to Roman antiquity with his adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's bestseller "The Eagle of the Ninth Legion". But the director also weaves numerous allusions to modern politics and society into the action, turning it into an ancient thriller with, unfortunately, few genuine moments of surprise.

The story is based on the mysterious disappearance of the Ninth Legion, which vanished from all records in 120 AD. What happened to the men, no one knows. What might have happened is what the film shows. For twenty years after the disappearance of the nearly 5,000 men, the son of the Ninth Legion's commander, Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum), arrives in Britain to restore his father Flavius' reputation. To accomplish this, he intends to retrieve the Golden Eagle, the Legion's field emblem and emblem of Rome's power. To do so, he must embark on a perilous journey beyond Hadrian's Wall, accompanied by the young British slave Esca (Jamie Bell), whose life Marcus has saved. But Marcus has no idea yet what dangers await him and his mysterious companion in the territory from which no Roman has yet returned alive.

It is to Macdonald's credit that he does not even attempt to play in a league with works such as "Gladiator". His "The Eagle of the Ninth Legion" is a relatively small, in some moments almost intimate adventure film that takes a much more restrained approach to the mystery surrounding the Ninth Legion than Neil Marshall last did in the rather bloodthirsty "Centurion". Macdonald focuses on the relationship between the Roman Marcus and the slave Esca, as well as Marcus's own personal motivations. There are hardly any big battle scenes, and when there are, they are staged quite gritty, dirty and quickly cut. The idea was not to present a big heroic epic with elaborate computer effects, but to tell a real story with believable characters. And in principle Macdonald succeeded very well.

Craft-wise, then, "The Eagle of the Ninth Legion", shot mostly in Hungary, is quite successful. But in the end, the one-time documentary filmmaker seems to fail here because of his too-high ambitions. As worth seeing as the imagery is, the story is hardly able to really captivate. Channing Tatum is not very credible as the Roman soldier and delivers a much too stiff performance. This makes it hard for the viewer to get lost in the action, the whole thing just seems too acted for that. The consequence is that the story in its simplicity doesn't really manage to grab you.

"The Eagle of the Ninth Legion" is not a bad film, it is unfortunately not really a good one either. The set, camerawork and music are all spot on, but the script and actors are only convincing in isolated moments. Where suspense should push the audience into the cinema seats, mostly boredom reigns at a high level. And all this leads to the conclusion that this ancient adventure film, despite many positive aspects, has become only quite conditionally worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp