Barbarians

 

Considering what a big deal it is, historically, I am kind of surprised that we haven’t seen more coverage of the battle of the Teutoberg Forest in film.  Fought in 9 AD, it was one of the most decisive contests in military history, in which gathered Germanic tribes dealt Rome one of the most severe defeats it ever suffered, destroyed three entire legions, and captured three regimental eagles, two of which were never recovered.  Shocked by the crushing setback, the aging Emperor Augustus decided never to push the empire’s borders beyond the Rhine, and the eastern Germans would never be subservient to Rome.

Barbarians (Barbaren in the original German) is a six-episode miniseries about the lead-up to the battle and the characters that drove it, finishing up with the epic event itself.  A German series, it was picked up for international distribution by Netflix.  The settings default to dubbed, but it is easy to switch back to the original spoken German and Latin, and I highly recommend that.  The German is modern, but it still adds a layer of verisimilitude to see historical Germans speak their actual language.  The Latin in the series has been lauded as being pretty authentic Classical Latin, and watching it all in subtitles emphasizes the cultural distance between the two cultures.

The authenticity of the show overall is high.  The Roman costuming is first-rate, and the Germanic characters are dressed in line with what we know about what the people of that era wore.  The weapons and armor are really excellent, as they are all accurate to the arms of the time period.  The soldiers of the legions wear a mix of styles of armor, from scaled to mail, and they don’t all look identical.  The swords all look really good, from the Romans with their gladii to the longer Germanic swords.  Spears are used much more often than we usually see in period pieces, and there is some effort to show the actual, historical battlefield tactics.

But this isn’t just a show about a battle.  Barbarians is a story about the conflicts between two peoples, expressed by characters.  The central figure of the battle is Arminius, who was born in Germania, then later went to Rome as a leader of auxiliary troops and returned to his homeland as a cavalry officer.  Here he is depicted as a son of a chief who was taken away as a hostage and raised by Varus, the Roman commander of the legions in Germania.  He comes onscreen presenting as a pure Roman, proud of his position and his adopted culture, who is pulled back to allegiance to his people by events and the ties of family and friendship.  Played by German actor Laurence Rupp with tremendous magnetism, Arminius is multilayered and conflicted.  Rupp is going to be a star someday soon, or he should be, with his gift for microexpressions and his bright blue stare.

The other two sides of the triangle are the invented character of Folkwin, Arminius’s childhood friend, and Thusnelda, the woman they both come to love.  Folkwin is played by David Schutter with a wonderful, mercurial energy, and I promise you that actress Jeanne Goursaud is going to get some attention.  Not only is she head-turningly beautiful, but she plays Thusnelda with complexity and ferocity.  She is completely believable as both the daughter of a Roman sympathizer caught up in events beyond her control, and as the war-painted, bloody-eyed witch-woman slaughtering legionaries with a spear.

The show goes to a lot of effort to not paint either side in black and white.  The Romans are patronizing and imperialist, and the show does not soft-pedal that, but we see them as actual human beings with their own desires and flaws.  Varus, the Roman commander who led the legions to disaster, is rather likeable in his own way, and we see him through Arminius’s eyes as a man who treated him well, and raised him like a father.  The Germans are fractious and fight each other at a moment’s notice, and they are not depicted as any kind of “noble savages”.  The show simply lays the battle out as a conflict of cultures, brought to a point by the choices of a few people who found themselves at particular places in the crucial moment.

So this is a series for Sword & Sorcery fans to dig in on.  It presents morally gray characters making choices against a backdrop of political intrigue and personal danger.  The violence is visceral and the fight scenes are satisfyingly brutal.  The culminating battle is suitably epic, even if, for my taste, there could have been a more detailed treatment of the tactics used, that’s just me being a military history nerd.  The show does a good job balancing known historical facts with the needs of drama, and makes for a satisfying historical epic.