They Shall Not Grow Old **** (2018, director Peter Jackson) – Movie Review

Director Peter Jackson’s magnificent and beautiful World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) is uniquely informative, evocative, moving and heart-rending, as well as a brilliant technical achievement in its incredible 3D colour images. Artistically, and thrillingly, the film begins in black and white, then switches to 3D colourised images for the trench sequences, and finally back to black-and-white as the surviving men arrive back home.

Jackson honours the dead and the brave with uncovering and painstakingly assembling much never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of the end of the war. The footage was preserved tucked away in the vaults of London’s Imperial War Museum for many years, so it is right and proper that it has finally seen the light of day, or at least the dark of the cinema, especially in this way. The voices of the old soldiers on the soundtrack are bright, vibrant and very poignant, and Jackson expertly and imaginatively tailors his images to their haunting testimonies. There is no narration, just these voices of the real soldiers who experienced the war first hand. It works beautifully.

Begun back in 2015, it is a vast undertaking, a labour of love for which Jackson did not receive any fee. His film crew sifted through more than 600 hours of interviews with more than 200 soldiers, and 100 hours of original footage shot in monochrome without synchronised sound, which was colourised by Jackson’s Wingnut film production company, with sound effects added, 100 years on. Jackson wanted the silent movie footage to play at a normal speed, not jerky and jarring, which was achieved by a sophisticated computer algorithm.

Jackson’s sole brief was to make the project respectful and interesting. So to keep the film accessible and fast moving, and develop his theme of re-creating the experience of being a soldier in the Great War, Jackson does not identify the soldiers or the specific battlegrounds shown. For authenticity, he decided to use only vintage film footage and artwork throughout. As no film of the intense hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches exists, he uses illustrations from his own collection of the serial magazine The War Illustrated drawn during the war, thus keeping period authenticity.

Jackson had unlimited access to the Imperial War Museum film archives and access to the BBC film and TV library, as the film is a co-production with the BBC. Jackson’s personal connection to the material is that his grandfather fought in the war.

They Shall Not Grow Old is nominated for a BAFTA Film Award as Best Documentary and a London Critics Circle Film Award for Documentary of the Year.

The title is adapted from a famous line in the poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon, who wrote ‘They shall grow not old’.

It premiered on 16 October 2018 at the London Film Festival in the presence of Prince William and on the same day copies of the film were sent to schools in the UK.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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