Beneath Hill 60 is a 2010 Australian war film about the Trench War. In 1916 the Australian mining engineer Oliver Woodward enlists in the army and is affected as new officer of a mining section, in the Western European trenches. Their mission is to dig under German trenches in order to set a powerful explosive device.
Contains examples of:
- Age-Gap Romance: There is an obvious spark between Woodward and Marjorie, but he points out that he's ten years older than her, and she's only sixteen, to which she replies "I'll be seventeen next month." Then he goes off to war. They marry after the war, by which time she would be about twenty.
- Anyone Can Die: Although the amount of alive characters is quite high at the end, who will die and who will stay alive isn't obvious.
- Baseball Episode: Rugby, to be more accurate.
- Big, Bulky Bomb: Their mission is to dig under a German headquarter and plant one under it.
- Buried Alive: What usually happens if you're caught in underground explosion and survive the blast.
- Evil Brit: Notably downplayed compared to other Australian war movies. Rutledge is an arse and there's some Anglo-Australian tension early on, but the enlisted men get along well (partly due to bonding over rugby) and General Lambert is a Reasonable Authority Figure.
- Fatal Family Photo: Subverted. The classic scene of exchange of the wife/fiancee/mother/etc. photographs is featured, but some of the characters stay alive.
- Fauxshadow: The explosives in the mine are electrically detonated, and we get several shots of groundwater dripping over the racks of wired-up explosives. When the time comes for the big bang, this goes unmentioned and causes no problems.
- Flashback: Although the main story occurs in the trenches, there are several flashbacks from Woodward memories of the previous years in Australia. The viewer understands at the end that the full story is itself a flash-back. The non-dated beginning sequence which shows Woodward wearing a formal uniform, followed by a cut putting him in the trenches of 1916, is shown again at the very end of the movie. He was preparing himself for his wedding, after the end of the war.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Commonwealth and German soldiers are both described as decent guys.
- Ignored Expert: A German NCO realises that the "British" miners have gone beneath the deep blue clay layer and tells his superior officer. The officer dismisses his concerns, because a mine that deep would need a ridiculous amount of explosives to do any damage. Unknown to him, the Brits do have a ridiculous amount of explosives down there.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Colonel Rutledge just after ordering Walter Sneddon to go to his death. Sneddon just left his watch post to warn Woodward that the Germans mining team was near his bait — digging a fake tunnel to deceive the German from finding the real — and Rutledge orders him to go back to his watchpost. Second after the Germans make the tunnel explode.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: General Lambert, who respects Woodward and overrules Rutledge on several occasions.
- Redemption Equals Death: Lieutenant Clayton is a rude, classist, ungrateful Jerkass in all of his scenes but his last one, where he's mortally wounded, helps me blow up an enemy bunker, and dies after sharing a few friendly words with the men he's been so nasty to in the past.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: The descriptive subtitles on DVD sometimes say SHOUTING when SHOOTING would be more appropriate.
- Stating the Simple Solution: After the German tunnelers get proof that there's a bomb underneath their lines, the New Meat digger asks his NCO why they can't just abandon the booby-trapped area and set up a new command post a short, strategically meaningless distance back. He's told their leaders will never admit defeat by giving up ground without a fight.
