Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Producer/director: Peter Jackson, Roadshow Entertainment.
Here is a documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of the end of the war.
Jackson (Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy) points out: “this is not a story of the First World War, it is not a historical story, it may not even be entirely accurate but it’s the memories of the men who fought – they’re just giving their impressions of what it was like to be a soldier”.
It is a film about a human experience, and being “agnostic in that way”. The aim was for it not to be an individual’s story, but one that ends up about “120 men telling a single story”. That specific story is “what was it like to be a British soldier on the western front?”
The decision was also taken to edit out any references to dates and places, because the movie was not going to be about “this day here or that day there”.
Painstaking effort has gone into creating this film using original footage of World War I from the Imperial War Museum’s archives, alongside audio from BBC and Imperial War Museum (IWM), interviews of British servicemen who fought in the conflict.
‘Most of the footage has been colorized and transformed with modern production techniques, with the addition of sound effects and voice acting to be more evocative and feel closer to the soldiers’ actual experiences’.
According to Jackson, the crew of They Shall Not Grow Old reviewed 600 hours of interviews from the BBC and the IWM, and 100 hours of original film footage from the IWM to make the film.
The interviews came from 200 veterans, with the audio from 120 of them being used in the film. After receiving the footage, Jackson decided that the movie would not feature traditional narration and that it would instead only feature audio excerpts of the soldiers talking about their war memories, in order to make the film about the soldiers themselves; for the same reason, it barely features any dates or named locations.
“[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 – rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film.” Amazing!
The Blu-ray viewing experience gives some understanding of what the men would have had to endure.
