They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

From the first I heard of this project, a commissioned restoration of archival World War I footage, I thought director Peter Jackson sounded like a good choice. But that was because much of what we've seen in his career, from Bad Taste to Heavenly Creatures to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has boasted a natural facility for gee-whiz technical stunts, nearly rivaling Robert Zemeckis for bravura in that realm. What I didn't know is that Jackson is a WWI buff—with a nearly complete run of the War Illustrated magazine and a handy collection of authentic uniforms on which his crew could base colorizing decisions. He also has some personal stake in what was first known as the Great War, with a grandfather who fought and an uncle who died in it. They Shall Not Grow Old, no surprise, is impressive. Jackson's restoration focused primarily on correcting small matters that can make its subjects seem more distant and rinky-dink to us now, adjusting film speeds for example to make movement natural, serving up the most subtle and extraordinary colorizing job I've ever seen (though I admit I haven't seen many), adding a lot of original foley and other sound work, and drawing on hundreds of hours of oral history interviews. It plays much like a Ken Burns documentary in that way—we only hear the words of veterans. Among other things, Jackson hired forensic lip-readers to track down what soldiers in the archival footage were saying, rerecorded artillery sounds in battle conditions, and traveled to Belgium to get the color palette right for specific locations. It's fair to call the result painstaking, and rewarding. The narrative approach removes events from historical specificity and instead offers a more generic WWI experience. The break in and out of color happens when we arrive and leave the Western Front, and no man's land. With the first flush of color it occurred to me that Vietnam and movies like Apocalypse Now have set the cinematic terms for the immediacy of color in war scenarios, a disorienting juxtaposition. The fear and tension of the soldiers and everything about their miseries is somehow more visceral in the intensity of this hallucinatory color. We see lots of detail about life in the trenches. We see and hear about horrible conditions, mud pools of decaying human, mule, and horse corpses into which a man could sink and drown. Lice. Rats. Gangrene. Terrible smells. Chemical gas attacks. We see and hear the constant shelling. We see an unnamed battle start to finish. That's where the War Illustrated images turned out to be useful, as no camera ever went near the fiercest battles. We also get an interesting thumbnail sense of the war, through the words of these veterans, as essentially a battle between Britain and Germany. We really come to know the texture and feel of this extraordinary war, one of the greatest and most lethal atrocities in history. Those soldiers, in those conditions, are some of the bravest who ever fought.