#124: They Shall Not Grow Old

They Shall Not Grow Old

Peter Jackson
Initial release: November 9, 2018 (UK)

Thinking back on how history has treated the first World War, perhaps the prevailing image for most people for a long time was of grainy black and white footage, people zipping about like Charlie Chaplin characters, and a sanitized, quaint view of the war and the world that it happened in. But as we approached that war's 100th anniversary, with all the terrible things happening in the world at the time, it was time for a reminder of what the world went through all those decades ago. That reminder came in the form of Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old.

Composed entirely of archive footage, photography and the occasional drawing, They Shall Not Grow Old is a stunning example of how to bring back a bygone era to life. Peter Jackson and his crew restored a hundred hours of footage, colorizing it and slowing it down, and using modern technology to make the footage flow more smoothly. In addition to that archive footage was a whopping 600 hours of recorded interviews with British war veterans, cut down to a mere ninety minutes, with the voices of 120 different men. Unlike traditional documentaries, there is no narration: only the interviewees tell the story, and none of them have names, no event depicted has a date. These nameless voices take us from the early outbreak of the war, when everyone is feeling good and patriotic, all the way through four years of pure hell, and finally coming home to an ungrateful nation. Voice acting and sound effects synchronized to the footage provide a sense of authenticity — objectively we know it's an addition, but it makes it feel more real. The net result is an unconventional documentary that goes out of its way to strip away the traditional elements of documentaries in the name of telling the stories of people who lived it, breaking down the barriers between audience and subject.

The restored footage alone is worth the price of admission, because we can now finally see the war as they saw it, with all the pain and terror and hours of boredom and occasional moments of levity that comes with it.

When I originally wrote this review, it was just ten days from the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (which was in June 1919, not November 1918, which was when the original Armistice was signed) and yet — and yet. After a pandemic, and the rise of white supremacist nationalism — come back to haunt us like a bad penny — the lessons of World War I continue to remain very relevant to us. If you want to understand the last century, you need to understand World War I, and Peter Jackson's wonderful, beautiful, sad monument to a destroyed generation is a good place to start. 

-june❤