8. The Eagle
The Film: As a hardcore movie buff, I was a little hesitant to watch this movie because the lead actor was Channing Tatum, who in my opinion hasn’t done a lot of good films. However, in this movie, he was brilliant and really connected with his character Marcus Aquila, a young Roman soldier who has to find and retrieve the Roman Eagle that his father lost north of Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland. The absence of special effects in the film make the fights and battles more realistic and exciting in the watcher’s eye.
Nonetheless, it’s really hard not to notice a very strange thing about this movie: it portrays early Britons with painted faces, teeth necklaces and skins for clothing rather like primitive tropical island savages. As we all know Britain is a relatively modern civilized nation but would the ancient Brits really look like that in year-round freezing Scotland? Most likely not! Other than this, there was nothing much wrong historically with this movie.
The Historical Events: According to the University of Reading, the original eagle statue was found in 1866 at the Roman town of Calleva near Silchester in Hampshire, which the University’s Archaeology Department has been excavating and researching since 1997. This was also the location for the film’s official press day. Archaeologists initially believed that the Eagle was part of a statue that stood in the city’s 2nd Century town hall, which burnt down in the third century. However, new research suggests that the bronze bird stood in the royal palace of the native British King that ruled that part of Britain on behalf of the Roman Empire, long before the Romano-British town hall was built.
It is believed that at some point the palace’s eagle suffered substantial damage and the town’s ruler had to repair it. Once fixed, it probably continued to reside in the royal palace until the building was destroyed, either by accidental fire or during renewed unrest, probably sometime in the 80s AD. During that mysterious destruction, the eagle was buried under the rubble of the palace, which ended up as part of the “hardcore” platform on which Silchester’s Roman town hall was built.