Mick LaSalle January 25, 2021Updated: January 29, 2021, 9:22 am
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes star in “The Dig.” Photo: Larry Horricks
“The Dig” is the story of how priceless archaeological discoveries were made in Sutton Hoo, England. But you don’t need to know anything about that to enjoy the movie. Think of it, instead, as a satisfying human story about people involved in a fascinating project that starts off promising and ends up enormous.
Along the way, it deals with Britain on the eve of war — it takes place in 1939, in the months leading up to the Nazi invasion of Poland — and about the effort to recover artifacts of a lost civilization, just as modern civilization was hanging in the balance.