This is a great, sturdy film relying on good acting and story telling.

There is nothing to get too excited about in the way of action or affects but the story is engaging and the characters feel very real and it is easy to empathise with them.

The 'war is hell' motif is there but isn't forced down your throat.

Production is high and the battlefield scenes look very real and the director made a great decision not to shoot everything in pitch blackness.

I don't know how accurate the film is but the events are definitely plausible.

Not quite Friday night material but definitely worth a watch.

"Beneath Hill 60" is about an Australian military company that dug a mine beneath the German position known as Hill 60 in order to detonate a cache of explosives. The operation was led by a mining man named Oliver Woodward (Brendan Cowell).

This movie was an atmospheric one, meaning the setting and the conditions of the setting established the mood. It was always dark, muddy, and dreary. Pretty much what war is. There was very little action which made the little action there was more poignant. The movie moved slow at times and could've benefited from some trimming. It was based upon true events and real people, and you could see they were trying to recognize Oliver for what he'd done.

The one indisputable conviction you are left with is that we should stay out of wars whenever possible. They tend to be unhealthy activities, far worse than smoking. World War I, the Great War as it was called before we learned to number them, doesn't get that much attention from Hollywood because the United States was only in it for about a year, as opposed to about four years for the major European powers. The Australian miners we see digging shafts under the enemy positions represent a nation that lost about 1.4% of its population killed in action, while the USA lost about .13%.

It's a gripping movie based on a real incident and it's relatively free of the usual war-time clichés, or the usual mine shaft clichés for that matter. In a sensitive and clever bit of casting, the boyish and generous Australian soldier, Tiffin, who is scared to death but nevertheless manages to function bravely in this holocaust is a good match for his frightened and homesick young German counterpart, Wagner. In some scenes they look like one another.

The principle character is Brendan Cowell, who plays the staunch Captain Woodward. He's a decent actor. He looks like a cross between Richard Todd and Timothy Hutton. All the major figures are miners, on both sides of No Man's Land, except for the stupid and dilatory senior officers -- a skeptical German Oberst and a blustering fool of a British colonel. What a mismanaged war that was. If your troops lost one thousand men and the enemy lost one thousand and one men, it was a victory for your side.

But we're not stuck in or beneath the British lines all the time. Flashbacks take us to Australia, to Woodward's courting of his future wife, and to his finally ending up in the tunnels, after which he was much decorated. Prudent use is made of special visual effects, including the final, momentous explosion, which yielded only a temporary victory. Other commentators have noted some weaknesses in the film -- the general lack of character development, the stereotypical English officers -- and I see their point. The movie isn't perfect.

When the mines blow up, we don't have to watch thousands of screaming Germans flying through the air, and we don't have to sit with the British through a shower of rocks and a charge over the top. But -- well, just look at how that terrific explosion is handled by the director. Mind you, this detonation is a real monster, heard and felt as far away as Dublin, and it's the end towards which the whole movie has been slogging. And what do we see of it? A hill, about two miles away, disappears in a slowly ballooning burst of flame and smoke. The roiling dark impact cloud rolls towards the camera across the muddy and pitted field, and when it finally reaches the camera -- cut to a wedding in Australia. Any lesser imaginations would have done it all quite differently.

The Aussies are to be admired for any number of reasons. I mean, they've fielded a whole horde of toothsome blond movie actresses for one thing, from Olivia Newton John to Cate Blanchett. But, that aside, the men go through a lot of male bonding without a whole lot of killing each other to prove their manliness. I'm tempted to suggest that their involvement in sports serves as an outlet for that testosterone, what William James called "the moral equivalent of war," but then I'm reminded of the Greek city states like Sparta and Athens. Great athletes, established the Olympic games, but they were constantly at war with one another.