The Dig

I saw The Dig a couple of days ago, and liked it pretty well, but many of my Facebook friends are praising it as well, so it’s a popular show and let me just jump on the old bandwagon and give you my review. Don’t worry too much about spoiler alerts, it’s based on a true story and you can look it all up online anyway.
There were a couple of things I liked about it very much. Based on a true story generally makes for a better film, IMO. The action is not as dramatic and violent as in most things we see nowadays, but it’s more meaningful. It’s set in England, which I like. It’s a very pretty place. But that’s not it. Americans (I’m not completely an exception) like all sorts of British stuff, like Downton Abbey (which I never saw) and Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter, and James Bond, and part of the appeal is the way they talk. I don’t just mean the accent. In your average American film, people are just telling each other to fuck off all the time. In British films they talk all British like, which sounds posh, and better than us, and we like that for some reason. I think, perhaps, we tend to mistake etiquette for class, since both are in such short supply on my natal side of the Atlantic.
It’s not entirely a true perception. Although Americans are the reigning world champs when it comes to sheer world ignorance, the Brits are close to dead even with us, I’m sure, in the average amount of dickwads and backstabbing weasels. It’s pretty much the same the world around.
And it has lots of archaeology, which I find very interesting, and some history, but while that will keep my interest (loved Time Team, that was a great show), it was the personal drama of the people involved that really made it good.
Whenever I see a film that’s based on real life, I always wonder just how closely based, and go to Wikipedia to check. One character who I thought “No, they just made her up for the movie, to have a little bit of a romantic interest,” was Peggy Piggot, who was tempted to cheat on her sexless husband with a dashing young aviator about to go off to WWII and probably get killed.
Well, the dashing young aviator may have been invented, maybe not, but Peggy Piggot went on to a long and illustrious career as an archaeologist, and Sutton Hoo was not even her greatest accomplishment. That’s not a spoiler alert, since it wasn’t in the film.