The Eagle

Last night I went with some friends to catch The Eagle. I was actually kind of excited to see this film. I love Jamie Bell's career, and the trailer looked decent. To be fair, I went in realizing I'd probably be unable to keep myself from comparing it with 2010's highly watchable Centurion. That said, my overall impression is, on a scale of one to five, it's a 2 1/2 in terms of a well made film. In terms of watchablity on that same scale, it's a seven.

This film is nothing if not entertaining. Unfortunately, I can't really decide how much of the humor was intentional. What was supposed to be a story of male camaraderie in the face of certain death came off as a campy, thinly veiled homoerotic love story. The plot isn't terrible strong, nor is it historically accurate, not that we can expect movies to be terribly historically accurate in this day and age. Still, this movie does a lot of things right. The armor, the costuming on a whole, the tidbits of Roman culture, Jaime Bell's stellar performance...

Unfortunately, as an action movie, it falls short. I don't ask for much from an action movie. Granted, I'm a woman, so all I want are hot men and fabulous, gratuitously violent fight scenes. Something blowing up is always a bonus. There is a reason I lobbied for one of the categories in the Twigmans to be best technical explosion. Still, The Eagle fails to stand up to my standard. The editing on the fight scenes was atrocious. It was nearly impossible to follow what was going on. Indeed, I wasn't even sure who won the battles until it cut to the survivors laying out the dead. I knew there was a problem when my roommate leaned over and asked if Uwe Boll edited the fight scenes. The camera work throughout the movie continued to be nonsensical, as was it's bizarre use of eagle cries as sound effects. My favorite nonsensical moment was when an eagle cry sounded whilst the camera focused on a barn owl. Yeah, it was a lot of that.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

As for the ending, it felt a bit contrived, to the extent that it became a completely different movie altogether. Honestly, someone should have died. Preferably Channing Tatum. Also, I'd like to know who told the filmmakers that the Scottish Picts used to be Aztecs.

~Lauren