9 / 10
Official trailer
Beneath Hill 60 is an Australian war film about a part of the First World War nobody talks about.
Jeremy Sims directed it. Brendan Cowell plays Captain Oliver Woodward, a Queensland mining engineer who led Australian tunnellers into the chalk under the Western Front to plant explosives below the German lines. The film leads up to one event: the detonation of nineteen mines at once beneath the Messines Ridge on June 7, 1917. The explosion was heard in London.
It killed approximately ten thousand German soldiers in a few seconds. It’s still one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever produced by human beings.
This is real, it’s mostly forgotten, and the film treats it like the buried history it is.
I think that’s its great strength. It takes a subject almost nobody has put on screen, gets the work right down to the boards and the stethoscopes, and trusts that men digging in the dark will hold my attention. They do, and it gets a 9 from me for it.
The Tunneling War
Both sides spent the war digging under each other. The Germans dug. The British dug. The Australians and Canadians and Welsh miners who were sent to do the actual work dug deeper. The tunnels went down sixty feet, then a hundred feet, into the blue clay below the chalk where the depth masked the sound of digging. The film shows the work in detail. Setting the boards. Listening with stethoscopes for the enemy’s digging. Counter-mining. The constant fear that the tunnel above yours was about to be detonated.
The tunnel photography is claustrophobic in a way most war films don’t attempt. The camera sits close to the faces, the lamps are real and the air looks bad. I feel the weight of the chalk above those men in every shot, and those scenes are harder for me to sit through than most combat scenes I can think of.
For Writers
Specialist subject matter is a writer’s gift if you respect it. The tunneling war is technical. It requires the audience to learn what a clay-kicker is, how a geophone works, why countermining matters, what blue clay does to muffled sound. Beneath Hill 60 teaches the audience these things by showing the work. It doesn’t pause to explain. The lesson is that competent characters doing competent work teach the reader the discipline as they go. Stop and lecture and you lose them. Show them the work and they learn.
The Cast
Brendan Cowell leads the film, and I like him a great deal in it. He plays Woodward as a working engineer first and an officer second, without the heroic profile of a leading man, and the part doesn’t need one. The supporting cast is mostly Australian character actors playing real Australian miners, most of them older than the average infantryman because mining takes years of skill to learn.
The home-front flashbacks to Queensland feature a romance subplot that does its job without overstaying. Bella Heathcote plays the woman Woodward leaves behind. The flashbacks are short. They don’t derail the underground story.
For Writers
Working-class technical heroes are underwritten in war fiction. The protagonist is usually an officer with literary sensibilities or a young man having his first experience of violence. Woodward is a mining engineer who knows exactly what he’s doing and why. The film doesn’t need to give him a poetic interiority because his competence is the character. The lesson is that you can build a protagonist out of skill instead of psychology if the skill is interesting enough and the stakes are high enough.
The Detonation
Sims stages the climactic explosion with restraint. Sims doesn’t try to compete with Hollywood scale. He shows the wires being connected, the plungers being readied, the order being given.
The camera pulls back. The screen brightens. The earth lifts. Then the long pressure wave. The reaction shots of the British officers above ground watching the German line disappear are the heart of the scene.
Restraint is the correct call here, and it’s the choice I admire most in the whole film. A more spectacular version would have made the audience think about the effects budget. The version Sims shot made me think about the ten thousand men in the chalk.
For Writers
The biggest moment in your story often needs the smallest treatment. If you overwrite a climax, the reader sees the writing instead of the event. Beneath Hill 60 has the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history at its center and shoots it with deliberate restraint because the explosion doesn’t need help. The lesson is that scale rarely lacks for impact. What it lacks for is meaning. Provide the meaning and the scale will land.
Craft Note
Jeremy Sims directed. David Roach wrote the screenplay, based on Oliver Woodward’s own wartime account. Brendan Cowell played Captain Oliver Woodward. Bella Heathcote played his fiancée. Supporting cast included Steve Le Marquand, Anthony Hayes, Mark Coles Smith. Released April 2010 in Australia. Based on the Australian Tunnelling Companies and the detonation of nineteen mines under Messines Ridge on June 7, 1917. Approximately ten thousand German soldiers killed in the initial blast.
Is Beneath Hill 60 as good as people say?
9/10. It’s the best film nobody has seen about a part of the First World War nobody talks about, and its obscurity is a scandal. The film honors the technical detail, the performances are honest, and Sims stages the detonation with the restraint the subject demands. If I could push one war film on people who think they’ve seen them all, it would be this one. Find it and watch it.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Beneath Hill 60, Wikipedia
- 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, Ieper (Ypres), Australian Government Department of Veterans' Affairs
- Beneath Hill 60 (2010), IMDb
