It’s a shame that three years of Peter Jackson and his wonderful team of outrageously creative and talented people were wasted on the Hobbit trilogy. Because if nothing else, Peter Jackson is one of the most visually daring filmmakers of our time. What he has done with the World War 1 documentary ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ is just astonishing in every aspect. He has taken a subject matter that we think we are at least sort of familiar with and paired it with a format that we think we have seen enough of to know what to except and created a truly mind-boggling experience. And I don’t use the word mind-boggling lightly here. The moment when the footage switches from silent black and white to color and sound is so transformative that in a moment it makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about this period of history.
Essentially the documentary takes 100-year-old footage shot during the war, and through computer wizardry restores it, colors it and adds sound to it. This is very effective because watching old, grainy, videos can be a little alienating and distant. Whereas giving it color, enhancing it and making it more contemporary really puts you into the middle of this horrendous conflict. It brings the soldier’s faces to life and makes you realize how tragically young they were. It shows you how similar they were to us. Their fear, their resolve, their humor, and their shock is so vividly visible on their faces that it is impossible not to be moved.
Furthermore, the narration accompanying the movie is audio from actual interviews with World War 1 veterans conducted four to five decades ago. As a result, the documentary has a very subjective feel which makes it quite different from your run of the mill documentaries. While normally documentary filmmakers try to be somewhat objective and therefore include testimony from third-party, independent sources. What Jackson instead chose to do is not edit out or fact check any of the voice-overs. So what we get is raw, unfiltered emotion from the people who actually lived the events being depicted in the film. And the way these narrations are inter-cut with the images is incredibly heart wrenching because it really gives all the nameless faces in those old films, that we have all seen dozens of times, a personality and a character.
Other than the narration, the filmmakers also used forensic lip readers to try to determine what the people in those old films were saying. They then hired actors to record those lines and edited that dialogue into the restored footage to really jaw-dropping effect. I don’t know what specific technique they employed because the addition of these new voices to the existing footage was seamless. Again this makes you realize how recent these events were because the people are speaking just like we do.
Sound has also been added to all the, for the lack of a better word, action including the gunfire, artillery shots, shelling, and bombing. Apparently, instead of using existing sound effects from audio libraries, they recorded fresh audio from actual military equipment. And I must say it was worth it because the effect is harrowing.
But perhaps most importantly, the movie is not just restored footage stitched together. There is an actual narrative. The movie focuses on a small group of British soldiers and follows them on their journey from when they were recruited into the army at the onset of the war, to when they return back home after the armistice. In between, we see how these soldiers spent their day to day lives during the war. How they interacted with their fellow servicemen. How their feelings changed from when they were in basic training to when they were in the freezing trenches being relentlessly shelled by the other side.
Finally, as if all of this wasn’t enough, in my screening (and I assume in most screenings of this movie) there was a 30-minute feature after the credits, which provides a fascinating look behind the scenes.
