Review: Beneath Hill 60 (2010)

Released April 15, 2010

Brendan Cowell's Captain Woodward somewhere under Hill 60

Spoilers for history: in 1917 members of the 1st Australian tunnelling Division detonated 19 mines under the German front lines in Belgium, resulting in the biggest ever man-made explosion. The blast, it is said, was heard as far away as Dublin. The lead up to this momentous event is the subject of this awfully old fashioned war movie set in the muddy misery of World War I. Don’t expect cries of “war is hell,” existential crises or sharp political comment, Beneath Hill 60 tells its story with a straight face and minimal reflection.

Our band of heroes, plucked from working in the mines back home, are lead by the soft-spoken Captain Oliver Woodward (Brendan Cowell). Tunnelling and explosive experts, they’re literally “diggers,” not soldiers. Before their reassignment to Hill 60, the movie skirts with tensions within the squad and between them and the more highly trained regular soldiers, but the underdeveloped characters are non-descript and expendable. As perfunctory is a relationship between Woodward and sixteen year-old farmgirl Marjorie Waddell (Bella Heathcote), told in flashback, which is low on romance but high in creepiness.

Despite impressive production values and cinematography (and a budget of only $9 million), director Jeremy Sims’ heavy theatre-trained hand is bludgeoning. Music swells, men fall in a slow motion swath of bullets and heroes make the necessary scarifies for the greater good. It’s undone, too, by some peculiar self-conscious acting from men who feel more like NIDA grads than working class miners. An exception is Steve Le Marquand’s as the gruff Fraser, a man who is not afraid to state his mind.

BH60, while delving into the procedures of war rather than its ideology, is no Hurt Locker. That film used specific details to illuminate Jeremy Renner’s adrenaline junkie protagonist. The characters in BH60, on the other hand, exist only at the service of the insufficiently explained plot. Not every war film needs to be a meditation on violence, but they do have to pass the most basic litmus test of any film: making the audience care, something Sims, despite his smooth and earnest production, struggles to achieve.