Movie Review: The Dig

 The excavation of Sutton Hoo is not as famous as King Tut's tomb, but it sort of rewrote the story of Anglo Saxon England.

and the recent film The Dig (on Netflix) is about why and how the mound ( on private land) was excavated..

The Sutton Hoo mound was thought to be a burial mound, and the woman who owned the land hired a local self trained archeologist to excavate it. Both of them thought that it would yield only bones (because usually thieves would find any gold etc.),

What they did not expect underneath the mound was a buried ship containing the dead king's remains and some of his treasures: Including Golden objects and the famous "Sutton Hoo" Helmet:

The Dig is a very low key film, that is more about character than action.

And it is put into the context of why the (dying) land owner wanted to excavate the mound: Because war was coming, and England was preparing for being bombed and probably being invaded, and if that happened, their history would be lost or deliberately destroyed.

The people act like ordinary people, and the film is about them.

The incidents include things like the fact that the woman whose decided to excavate the mound was dying of rheumatic heart disease, her son who is trying to cope with the idea of death,  the failed rescue of a student pilot who crashed nearby, the "untrained" excavator whose work was never given credit because of class bigotry, and a (fictional) "romance" angle of the lady archeologist, that unlike most modern films, was handled in a low key manner.

So should you watch it? Only if you want a nice, low key film that simply tells a story instead of the usual "blood guts and sex" films that seem to be the norm nowadays.

and it is a film that might be worth watching twice, to pick up the nuances.

I give it a four out of five stars.

Smithsonian story of Sutton Hoo, and discusses the film.

Factoid: My Filipino stepson asked what "Sutton Hoo" meant, and the Smithsonian article explains:

The name is derived from Old English: “Sut” combined with “tun” means “settlement,” and “hoh” translates to “shaped like a heel spur.

History of England podcast discusses here.

The most fictional part of the story in the film is the "romance" of the lady archeologist, which never happened; this is ironic, since the film is based on a novel about the excavation: written by her nephew many years later. (discussed in this video).

 This doesn't bother me, because as I commented in an earlier blog post: Often the fiction gets the really important things correct without getting lost in an ocean of trivial "Facts" that are often based on (faulty) memories or on what people managed to write down at the time (which had it's own unconscious bias).