November 11, 2018 we celebrated the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of World War I, a war of unfathomable destruction and waste, and sadly, only the opening act to the bloodiest conflict to the worst conflict in human history, World War II. But for all the ink that World War II gets and how much it gets studied, surprisingly little is known about its bloody forebearer, World War I. And the sad thing is, no one seems to really care as much. Maybe because the motivations of World War II are so much easier to comprehend to several generations who don’t want to think too hard about history and its consequences, maybe because of the confused nature as to how World War I started, or maybe a combination of both, but those who study history realize that World War II was merely a continuation of the issues of World War I. In any case, They Shall Not Grow Old is not meant to be a documentary of the great issues, battles, or even the great truths World War I can teach us. In fact, it is the strangest documentary of its type that I have ever seen. It is the documentary, if that is the right word, of the experience of being a solider in the British Army during World War One. In a fascinating documentary about the documentary at the end of the movie, director Peter Jackson explains he wanted to make a story regarding the experience of the common solider during this most destructive conflict.
In this regard, the movie is surprisingly complete for the typical solider’s story. The movie originally started out as a project from the Imperial War Museum and the BBC to memorialize the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. The Museum had hundreds of hours of film footage and the BBC hundreds of hours of interview material from the 70s and 80s from World War One veterans. The project that was handed to Peter Jackson was to use as much of this material to give the viewer and idea of what World War One was, which, from a historical perspective, is quickly becoming to be like a forgotten war. The film starts from the outbreak of war, to the initial recruitment drives, through the basic training, the wartime experiences, and finally the experiences back home after the war where the country had little use for the veterans and left them alone to deal with the horrors of what they had experienced, today what we would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The movie is astonishingly complete in the mundane and extraordinary experiences the men felt during this time.
But the movie does most historical documentaries one better. Unlike the footage from the countless other documentaries we have seen over the years, Peter Jackson and his crew took great steps to clean and restore the film as much as possible, and most astonishingly, realistically colorize it. Now this isn’t just any thrown together job of colorization that we have seen from movies in the past, this was an astonishing attempt to get the colors and atmosphere so correct that it is as if you were really there. I was impressed by the History Channel’s superb documentaries, WWII In HD and Vietnam In HD that did basically the same thing, but this movie went the step further. Peter Jackson’s crew corrected the time difference of the hand-cranked 18 frames per second from filmed subjects back then to the correct 24 frames per second we are used to seeing today. When we look at historical footage, it has almost a surreal feel because of this technical problem. By correcting this, Jackson has made the footage even more real. He brought in lip readers so we could hear what the men were saying onscreen. He included foley effects from the real weapons so the film would sound right. He even brought actors from the same areas of England that the units were from so the accents would be right. This insane attention to detail brought a vitality to the men and their emotions that we see onscreen. There is absolutely nothing about this film that does not feel “real” in every sense of the word.
And what a payoff it is. It does a justice to these men who fought, suffered and died under the most hellish of circumstances by focusing on their experiences, their emotions, and ultimately their humanity. In this way, this was the most different documentary I have ever seen because it is a documentary of feelings, not cold facts and dates. It is almost wrong to call it a documentary, because it is a presentation of emotions and experiences, something that is usually subjective, which basically goes against a documentary’s usually mandate. Yet there is nothing untrue here. It is emotion laid bare and raw, worthy of the finest storyteller, and yet it is all real. This is a work of immense achievement, not for its breadth and scope, but for its intimacy of such a large subject. Ultimately, it succeeds so well where other documentaries fail so utterly; it is a true memorial to the men of whom it’s about, a towering feat of a conflict I barely know, and yet fell deep intense feelings for. This movie is phenomenal and should not be missed. Finally, stick around after the credits for a fantastic documentary about the making of the film that is just as good as the film itself.
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