Back in 2015 director Peter Jackson, of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies fame, was asked by the BBC, the British Imperial War Museum, and an arts group called 14-18 NOW to produce a documentary to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the First World War. Jackson, whose paternal grandfather had fought in the war, agreed to make what would be his first documentary. For the next two and a half years, he and his crew poured through over 100 hours of war footage and 600 hours of audio files of interviews of World War 1 veterans, and during that time Jackson chose to no only restore the aging film footage (much of which was in really bad shape) but also to colorize certain parts of it. As Jackson commented, “[The men] saw a war in colour, they certainly didn’t see it in black and white. I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more.” Moreover, given that the film footage Jackson restored was silent, Jackson hired speech professionals to spend countless hours reading the lips of the soldiers in film archives so that he could dub in voices for them, as well as using all manner of tricks and techniques to create all the other sound effects of life at the front.
In a style similar to 1987’s Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam or the 1990 PBS miniseries The Civil War, the film begins in black and white with a square “window” that is smaller than the theater screen as the voices of WW1 veterans narrate there experiences of life in 1914 London when news of the war broke out. We then hear about and watch footage of the men enlisting, being sorted out, going through basic training, and eventually being deployed to Europe. However, when the soldiers arrive at the actual battle front, the film’s ratio changes to fill the whole screen but also turns to color..
It is at this point that we see how Jackson and his crew’s patient and skillful use of modern technology to restore and colorize the old war footage, when combined with the 3D format, has produced a film that has a surreal feel to it which will now redefine the phrase “in living color.” And it is the combination of these three elements- the color, the dubbing, and the 3D- that we as the audience can indeed see past “the fog of time” and see the harsh realities of the life of a British soldier at the Western Front. All of the muck and filth, the death and destruction, and the grief and sense of dislocation when they returned to civilian life, that some of us might have only read about or seen in grainy video clips comes to life in a way that at times is hard to watch.
Interestingly enough, one thing that is conspicuously missing from They Shall Not Grow Old are many of the actual names, dates, and places, let alone any of the politics of the day which led up to the war. This was deliberate on Jackson’s part because, as he comments in a short film short after the movie, he wanted to make a “film by a non-historian for non-historians” and because he “just wanted to tell a story about what it was like to be a British soldier on the Western Front in WW1.” In this he succeeds as overall the film is a decent but grim portrayal of men who were thrown into unwinable situations by government leaders who were still stuck in an era where war still seen as a kind of “sport of kings.” We see and hear of men at their worst as the veterans tell of the utter violence they sometimes dealt out to the Germans as they sought to avenge their fallen comrades, but men who nonetheless were not beyond redemption. For when the men spoke of their care for one another as well as their German POW’s, it is evident that even though a war may not be wholly just according to the Just War principles, it is still possible for an individual soldier to war justly.
Finally, there is a 30 minute behind the scenes film short after the credits roll, which is a must watch for any history or film buff. Jackson himself goes into great detail about all the work that went into making this film, but also about all the different angles on the war, such as the naval aspects or the home front, which he wanted to explore but couldn’t.
The film is rated R because of the now colorized and restored scenes of carnage and rotting corpses. To be sure, movies such as Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge are far more gory, but the fact that you are seeing actual combat footage may be disturbing for some. So viewer discretion is advised.