Beneath Hill 60

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

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.


Tropes used in Beneath Hill 60 include:
  • 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.
  • Aussies With Artillery
  • Badass Bookworm: Woodward.
  • Badass Mustache: Sgt. Bill Fraser.
  • Badass Normal: Almost all the main characters.
  • Baseball Episode: Rugby , to be more accurate.
  • Based on a True Story
  • Beneath the Earth
  • 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.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending
  • 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.
  • A Father to His Men: Woodward.
  • Flash Back: 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.
  • Jerkass: Colonel Wilson Rutledge.
  • 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.
  • Shell-Shock Silence
  • War Is Hell
  • World War I: Obviously.