Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, occupies a different register from the gladiatorial epics and political dramas that constitute most of Hollywood’s Roman output. It is a frontier film, a journey narrative, set in Roman Britain and the territory beyond Hadrian’s Wall, and it is interested in questions that the arena films are not: what does it mean to serve an empire at its geographical and civilizational limits, and what does Rome look like from outside?