They Shall Not Grow Old 2019
I remember hearing about the amazing work Peter Jackson did restoring footage from World War I for this movie, giving it a much great impact than jittery off-speed newsreel footage could ever do. I finally picked it up using a Screen Pass and watched. It is fairly short with less than 90 minutes of real footage. The first 10 minutes or so has a lot of footage of war posters and the credits are pretty long at the end. To me it is not so much a documentary as just edited film footage plus audio from soldiers telling about their daily life. It extends from before the war, to recruiting, enlistment, and training. Once they reach the battlefield, the footage has more restoration, correcting the speed and colorizing the film. You get more grisly visuals than usual, made starker with artificial bloody reds. It is always easier to film outside of combat, so most of the film is behind the scenes and the effects of battle (injured people, bodies, wreckage). Also, Jackson just wants to give a soldier’s perspective, so he leaves out references to dates, places, and particular people. So it isn’t as informative as something on PBS and the length doesn’t allow the kind of depth that a multi-episode PBS special could bring either. It is still worth watching, but it is like learning about a war by just looking at the pictures in a book, but the audio is pretty informative. Because you don’t get to see any extras with a Screen Pass, I couldn’t see how they actually restored any of the footage or comparisons with the original material. That’s a different movie than something about the war though, but that is also the real accomplishment of this film, so it seems a little hollow. It is good, definitely worth watching, but also pretty gory.
Written: 04 Feb 2022