Another sordid attempt at drowning.
Stone of Destiny (2008) is a slightly fictionalized story of a real incident. The Stone of Scone, aka Stone of Destiny, is a real thing, a Scottish boulder with associations to the Scottish monarchy.
At the time of the movie, 1950, the Stone of Scone was stored in Westminster Abbey, having been plundered and removed from its Scottish home by King Edward I of England in 1296. A young Scottish college student, Ian Hamilton, like many other young Scotsmen, hungers to return the Stone as a symbol of Scottish nationalism. Unlike most, though, he falls in with just the right mix of fellow students to actually accomplish the task: a hard drinking engineering student, a more studious and withdrawn friend of the engineer, and a young nationalist woman, who provides motivation and support.
The charm of the story is in the details of the theft, as it is with most such stories: ducking the cops, getting access to the location, obtaining the plunder, and getting out of Dodge, or London. Further, the story shows the myths of the Scottish, namely grit, persistence, and hard drinking.
But there’s also the vivid difference between a national leader, John MacCormick, who is balancing national politics, such as retaining plausible deniability even as he provides finances, and must think of the optics of being a nationalist not only to Scotland, but a wide world, and the group of students, who, despite internal rows, should have the motto Let’s get this shit done!
This is not necessarily an inspirational story. Failure did not mean death, but more likely personal embarrassment. But it’s educational and fun.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
