Adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel; The Eagle of the Ninth; the upcoming movie The Eagle, tells the story of a young Roman officer’s search to find out the truth of what happened to Rome’s ill-fated Ninth Legion; the infamous Legion that went missing on a mission into Scotland, and was never seen again.
Known as an unconquerable landscape that was inhabited by savages, Scotland was one of the few places that could not be incorporated into the Roman Empire, and a place that even the hardiest Roman soldiers were afraid of venturing into; but despite the disappearance of an entire legion, The Eagle’s hero; centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum, Fighting); is determined to find the truth behind the Legion’s disappearance, and the fate of the Legion’s Eagle Standard.
Whilst not a direct sequel, The Eagle can almost be counted as the follow-on to Centurion; as it focusses on finding out what happened to the missing Legion depicted in that film, and has a fairly similar premise; as it’s set twenty years after the disappearance of the Ninth, and also features only a handful of men, deep in enemy territory, being hunted by savage local tribes.
Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) has directed the movie; which, as well as Tatum, stars Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot), Donald Sutherland (The Pillars of the Earth), and Mark Strong (Robin Hood), in the action/drama which is due to be released in the U.S. on February 11, 2011, before hitting U.K. screens a fortnight later, on February 25th.
