Movie Review: They Shall not Grow Old

In They shall not Grow Old, Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings, takes 100-year-old film footage from World War I and revamps it for modern a audience. What were once silent, black and white, 13 frame video recordings from 1914 to 1918 are now comparable to blockbuster films of the late 80s. Commissioned by the centennial of the Armistice, Jackson takes over 100 hours of footage, not only completely accurately portraying these historical artifacts, but also humanizing the brave, yet hitherto forgotten, people who fought in such a tragic battle. This film casts profound insight into those troubled times and our own human nature.

As a juxtaposition to demonstrate the abilities of today’s technology, the film spends the first 20 minutes or so in the usual grainy, black and white documentary reels we’re all accustomed to. The film then expands, inviting the watcher into the richness of its details: scratches, red blood, high definition faces, sound effects, all of which the original footage is devoid of. The words the soldiers said were recreated with state-of-the-art lip reading technology. Although the sounds were realistic and gritty, they were sometimes gratuitous, appearing where they didn’t need to be or distracting from other visual aspects.

During the entirety of the movie, there’s always recorded interviews from veterans playing over the footage. Sometimes Jackson has us seeing artwork and images as still frames. This does a great job of being immersive. The voices of the British veterans describing the boredom of going into boot camp, or cracking jokes while in the trenches to kill some time, evoked wonder of how different times are. There were times when it could become droning, feeling a lack of connection to the action, but it’s a documentary compilation, not a drama; yet despite the format, Jackson found the right sequence of images that creates empathy and narrative through something as simple as a prolonged stare from a bewildered cavalryman.

Jackson holds no punches with the gritty content. The film sprinkles images of dead soldiers forever memorialized in a disturbing death stance; it shows the latrines; it details every stomach-turning dimension of the horrors of the trenches; It casts a light that puts into perspective every war movie that tries to capture the hardships of the great war--except it’s all real. Knowing the reality of every scene removes the layer of suspension of disbelief required in every movie, and what’s left is the same question that most who fought in the war had by the end of it: how could war ever be worth all the trouble?

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