Romans recast as GIs in history lesson for Iraq and Afghanistan
The world’s best equipped army ventures into a wild mountain landscape to punish an enemy that it barely understands and badly underestimates, with predictably disastrous results.
It is easy to see how film-makers might spot a contemporary resonance in the legend of the lost Ninth Legion: a detachment of crack Roman troops who set off to fight the Picts in Scotland in AD117 and never came back.
Five or six films about this lesson from history have been mooted since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Two are finally being made, by two of Britain’s leading directors.
Kevin Macdonald, who made The Last King of Scotland and next week’s big release, State of Play, is adapting Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic children’s yarn, The Eagle of the Ninth, with Jamie Bell in a lead role. Neil Marshall, the director of the cult horror films Dog Soldiers and The Descent, has recently finished shooting Centurion, with a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, David Morrissey, Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko, who was the main Bond girl in Quantum of Solace last year.
Film history is littered with examples of topics that suddenly become the subject of two or more rival films. There is rarely room for both to succeed. So when Christian Colson, the producer of Slumdog Millionaire who is making Centurion, first spoke to Duncan Kenworthy, the producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, about his Eagle of the Ninth project he feared the worst.
“We had lunch and went ‘Oh s***! We’re making the same film’,” Colson said yesterday. “But we quickly reassured each other that we were occupying slightly different territory.”
The overlap, however, is still striking. Both films start with an almighty pitched battle between Romans and woad-daubed barbarians before focusing on a small group of characters in a long chase through epic Highland landscape. Both sets of film-makers see their projects as “Scottish westerns”. They are both striving for an authentically gritty mood rather than the traditional “swords and sandals” feel, both eschewing special effects in favour of extras and real stunts and both comfortable with their films being read as political allegories.
Neither team seems to mind that modern historical opinion suggests that the Ninth Legion survived its tour of duty in Scotland, only to be wiped out in the Middle East later in the second century.
In The Eagle of the Ninth, all the Romans will be played by Americans and “look like GIs” to emphasise the parallels with modern politics, while British actors will play the Picts.
“In a way it is an Iraq or Afghanistan war film taking place in the second century,” Macdonald said.
Films explicitly about Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah have failed at the box office, but Macdonald believes that audiences will be comfortable exploring similar ground if the empire in decline was 2,000 years ago...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
It is easy to see how film-makers might spot a contemporary resonance in the legend of the lost Ninth Legion: a detachment of crack Roman troops who set off to fight the Picts in Scotland in AD117 and never came back.
Five or six films about this lesson from history have been mooted since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Two are finally being made, by two of Britain’s leading directors.
Kevin Macdonald, who made The Last King of Scotland and next week’s big release, State of Play, is adapting Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic children’s yarn, The Eagle of the Ninth, with Jamie Bell in a lead role. Neil Marshall, the director of the cult horror films Dog Soldiers and The Descent, has recently finished shooting Centurion, with a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, David Morrissey, Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko, who was the main Bond girl in Quantum of Solace last year.
Film history is littered with examples of topics that suddenly become the subject of two or more rival films. There is rarely room for both to succeed. So when Christian Colson, the producer of Slumdog Millionaire who is making Centurion, first spoke to Duncan Kenworthy, the producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, about his Eagle of the Ninth project he feared the worst.
“We had lunch and went ‘Oh s***! We’re making the same film’,” Colson said yesterday. “But we quickly reassured each other that we were occupying slightly different territory.”
The overlap, however, is still striking. Both films start with an almighty pitched battle between Romans and woad-daubed barbarians before focusing on a small group of characters in a long chase through epic Highland landscape. Both sets of film-makers see their projects as “Scottish westerns”. They are both striving for an authentically gritty mood rather than the traditional “swords and sandals” feel, both eschewing special effects in favour of extras and real stunts and both comfortable with their films being read as political allegories.
Neither team seems to mind that modern historical opinion suggests that the Ninth Legion survived its tour of duty in Scotland, only to be wiped out in the Middle East later in the second century.
In The Eagle of the Ninth, all the Romans will be played by Americans and “look like GIs” to emphasise the parallels with modern politics, while British actors will play the Picts.
“In a way it is an Iraq or Afghanistan war film taking place in the second century,” Macdonald said.
Films explicitly about Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah have failed at the box office, but Macdonald believes that audiences will be comfortable exploring similar ground if the empire in decline was 2,000 years ago...