VOD Spotlight: “The Eagle”

The Eagle has its story in fact — that the Ninth Legion of Roman soldiers vanished into what is now Scotland. Furious at what was likely a defeat by barbarians, the Roman emperor Hadrian built a wall to seal off the edge of the known world. Known as Hadrian’s Wall, the ruins of it exist to this day.

The story was the basis for the novel The Eagle of the Ninth, an epic tale of heroism by Rosemary Sutcliff, one of the favorite novels of The Eagle producer Duncan Kenworthy. “It’s a wonderfully resonant and exciting story, with characters, issues, and emotions as vivid to me today as when Rosemary dreamed them up. I decided there and then that one day I would make a movie of it,” Kenworthy says.

He intended to do a large-scale action film, but a teaming with director Kevin Macdonald (Touching The Void), also a fan of the novel, changed the film’s focus.  “The story is also about friendship; the lead characters are two people from different cultures who don’t understand each other and who see the world in different ways, and who must move beyond that to see each other as human beings,” Macdonald says.

“The key narrative structure of the film – two men on an impossible quest – isn’t itself complicated, though it has surprising twists and turns. But there are some very rich resonances. These two men are completely different: Roman and Briton, conqueror and conquered, neither of them liking or even understanding the other, yet tied together – not literally, like the two convicts in The Defiant Ones, but as master and slave.”

“The Eagle” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.

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© 2011 Universal Studios.