The Eagle Has Fallen

[Alanus]

Wow, Chris! :eek:

I just checked out the article and its accompanying photo.
That's not an eagle. It's a chicken. :woot:
It could make an entirely new series of novels: Chicken of the Ninth. Then, The Lost Chicken... and finally, Chickenturion. :whistle:

[BrianY]

Alan,
That is not funny! :-x It's hilarious! :woot: :woot: You do have a wicked sense of humor!,
illy:
I should have called mine The Chicken Has Fallen.....

On a separate note what's everyone's thoughts about The Eagle v's Cenurion movies ?

Did people enjoy them ? What was the general feedback of history buffs?

[visegrip]

Well since I'm really a newbie in this area, I liked both movies. I think the cinematography of Centurion was better. But I really liked the story and characters of the Eagle.

I'm sure technically both movies were loaded with inaccuracies but great entertainment!

Chris

[Nathan Ross]

what's everyone's thoughts about The Eagle v's Cenurion movies ?

Here's some (mostly not very serious!) crits, actually on both films:

The Eagle

[Alanus]

I liked Centurion better than The Eagle. Tatum acted like a wooden Indian, and the Seal People looked like Eskimos landing from northern Greenland. Jamie Bell did a decent job. Centurion was marred by Fassbender, one of those rising non-actors in the Tatum mode. Then we had a goofy pugnacious general who hires a mute-female-Russian scout who turns out to be smarter than the entire Ninth. :whistle:

Both films were tainted (or tinted) by darkness, so dark you wanted to turn a light on!
Ancient Period movies created by Britain-Hollywood have become so dark that you might as well go back to a B & W screen. Check out a Chinese or Korean period flick and you have REAL COLOR and better overall cinematography.

[Vindex]

On a separate note what's everyone's thoughts about The Eagle v's Centurion movies ?

Michael Fassbender has a much better voice than Tatum wozzisname.

Shame we didn't get to see the knees...always VERY important in my view ;-) . The best "ancient" knees in my book are Richard Egan as Leonidas in the original 300 and Martin Landau as Rufio in the Burton/Taylor Cleopatra.

Best film is Carry on Cleo, however...

(You can tell it's Friday!)

[Alanus]

Michael Fassbender has a much better voice than Tatum wozzisname.
(You can tell it's Friday!)

That's why Tatum only had 5 dialoge lines in the entire movie. The only actor to have less was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbaian, which-- to this day-- remains as the finest ancient chop-em-up flick of all time... even though it's based on fantasy. illy:

"Crush your enemy, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!"
The greatest barbaric line ever written (courtesy of John Milius)

I stole it, almost verbatum, for The Chicken Rising :woot:
Actually, I used it in The Demon's Door Bolt.

[Michael Kerr]

Vindex wrote:

Shame we didn't get to see the knees...always VERY important in my view

Hi if you want to see knees or men in skirts you have to have an Aussie actor eg.
Mel Gibson Braveheart
Rusty Crowe Gladiator
Sam Worthington Clash Of The Titans
But getting back to books I would love a novel about the "Battle of Mons Graupius" with a northern tribesman as the protagonist and not the bad guy as usual.

Regards
Michael Kerr

[BrianY]

Iam concerned that we were taking about Roman movies and now have lurched tot he subject of knees!

Just wondering when the next Roman Blockbuster movie is out.
We need one! there is enormous interest in all things Roman!

Did everyone catch BBC this week and Margaret Mountford discussing how Pompeii and herculaneum citizens were killed? I found it engrossing!

Its about time we had a new Roman movie!

[Timianus]

Alan,
On a separate note what's everyone's thoughts about The Eagle v's Cenurion movies ?

Did people enjoy them ? What was the general feedback of history buffs?

Centurion: Decent "B" flick that could have been much better. Biggest problem with this movie is that it couldn't decide what it wanted to be: 1) battle flick 2) rescue flick 3) horror massacre flick; 4) cheesy HW film?

I liked the cinematography and score better in Centurion, but it was ruined by numerous plot holes, non-cohesive story line, and utterly silly ending. I think with better editing/directing the film could have been much, much better.

Silly plot holes:
1. Lets march an entire legion into enemy territory under the direction of an angry mute that we raped, without sending a scouting party.
2. Lets all stare at the big flaming fireballs coming to kill us instead of moving out of the way.
3. Lets go on a rescue mission without the tools needed to free the general!. Now that we found him, we might as well give up.
4. Maybe if we leave a bright shiny helmet on the top of a mountain, the expert tracker won't be able to find us!
5. Genius! Lets "hide" in the only man-made structure we have seen all week!
6. How about we kill the only survivor of a military disaster instead of debriefing him and figuring out what went wrong.

Eagle: Bad "B" flick that wanted desperately to be an A-list hit. About the only thing I liked about this movie was that it attempted to show a cohort fighting and maneuvering as a unit in battle, rather than the typical "walk in a straight, pretty line, then duke it out mano-e-mano." That said, the costuming was horrid. Acting was worse. Anachronisms galore ("no fight with a slave is a fair fight"--you tell them Donald...how very progressive and un-Roman of you!); and ridiculous depiction of "seal people." In short, I thought they ruined a perfectly good book. I also did not realize that you could melt gold in a wood fire in five minutes

I may watch Centurion again....I most certainly will not watch "The Eagle."

[Alanus]

We're drifting away from novels but you hit it on the head, Tim. :cheer:

I managed to painfully watch Tatum the Wooden Indian for half the flick, even the part where Jamie Bell walks at him in his bedroom while wagging a dagger. But the Seal People killed me! Right from Outer Space, the same place the script-writer and director came from. :dizzy:

[Robert Vermaat]

Actually I think Sutcliff's characterisation was the weakest aspect of the 'eagle' novels - her repeated Marcus Aquilas always seemed a bit bland to me and lacked depth. Alcibiades in her 'grown up' novel The Flowers of Adonis was much darker and more complex, so it was probably just a product of the intended readership.

Exactly. Alcibiades is for different readers, you can't confront 11-14 year old readers with that guy yet. :evil:

Sutcliff was great at plot, pace and description - 'eagle of the ninth' etc have a really vivid sense of place and atmosphere. Some of the landscapes in Frontier Wolf (another 'Aquila' book) are really quite lyrical.

Which is especially daunting hen you realise that she, because of her physical limitations, was never able to visit the places she wrote about.
Maybe her characters are eveolved less than they could, but in historical fiction I don't think that's needed. To the contrary, some authors want to put their stamp on a historical personage, thereby altering the entire character.

A lot of what Sutcliff wrote has been corrected by archaeology. Already when she was writing, she had to change to findspot: originally the villa she had in mind turned out to be th basilica and in a later novel she 'reburied' the eagle accordingly.

[Timianus]

Exactly. Alcibiades is for different readers, you can't confront 11-14 year old readers with that guy yet.

Sad commentary on the present state of education, but I bet you would be hard pressed to find many 11-14 year old readers that could actually comprehend Eagle of the Ninth today.

[Alanus]

Robert & Tim,

I wrote for an international magazine for 25 years and made good money.. until the editor told me I had to dummy-down my columns. Demigraphics showed the average subscriber reading at the 8th-grade level. I quit and began writing novels... which is why I'm dead-broke today. 8)

[M. Demetrius]

They write newspapers in the US to the 6th grade level. Most Internet news is below that.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens or Herman Melville couldn't publish a novel today.
Shakespeare would be told that "nobody will get it if you write it with such lofty language."

Intellectually, we're doomed.