I PURCHASED TICKETS FOR “They Shall Not Grow Old” as soon as I saw the trailer. I had not known prior of Peter Jackson’s passion project, nor that he had been ‘in the trenches’ with it for nearly four years.
The documentary had been proposed by the Imperial War Museum’s arts program, 14-18 NOW, whose task was to honor the centennial of the First World War. In conjunction with the BBC, they approached “The Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson about bringing more than a hundred hours of century-old British archival footage to life on the silver screen.
Your typical director would have compiled the most varied, visceral, and preserved film stock into a 90-minute reel before hiring Michael Caine or Richard Attenborough to record narration, detailing all the lengths of Britain’s involvement in the First World War — but Peter Jackson is no normal director. Jackson in particular is obsessive; devoted wholly to narrative precision.
In filming “The Lord of the Rings,” he had a backstory conceived for each of a thousand nameless orcs, and those backstories were uniquely portrayed in their armor, warpaint, and behavior. ‘Sting’ was a real sword, engraved with a phrase in ‘Sindarin,’ the eldest form of the fictional Elvish language. The chainmail shirts worn beneath soldiers’ clothing were real, forged and linked by hand. Arwen and Aragorn had finely-detailed, purpose-sewn sleeve seams. And etcetera.
Upon viewing, “They Shall Not Grow Old” has evidently been prescribed the same directorial precision. Given full access to the Imperial War Museum’s archives, Peter Jackson and his longtime collaborator, editor Jabez Olssen, personally reviewed over a hundred hours of mostly never-before-seen film stock in order to select the most emotionally-descriptive shots. They ultimately decided on ninety-nine minutes’ worth of evocation from the soldier’s perspective.
“We made a decision not to identify the soldiers as the film happened. There were so many of them that names would be popping up on the screen every time a voice appeared. In a way it became an anonymous and agnostic film. We also edited-out any references to dates and places, because I didn’t want the movie to be about this day here or that day there. There’s hundreds of books about all that stuff. I wanted the film to be a human experience and be agnostic in that way.” He didn’t want “individual stories about individuals,” instead, “I wanted it to be what it ended up being: one-hundred and twenty men telling a single story, which is: What was it like to be a British soldier on the Western Front?”
“This is not a story of the First World War,” the director told his audiences, “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.” Instead of an omniscient narration, describing the entirety of the war in the manner of a history lesson, Peter Jackson wanted to portray the life of a typical British soldier from the perspective of the men who were there. Given the similarities of every nation’s battlefronts and conditions—in the muddy deadlocked trenches of humanity’s first mechanized war—the experiences of these British few could’ve been said for any and every soldier.
“The First World War, for good or for worse, is defined in people’s imaginations by the [footage] that is always used in all the documentaries,” said Jackson, “and it looks bloody awful, for obvious reasons.” The vast majority of the film archives had to be restored, as the passing of a hundred years had faded, shrunk, or damaged the film stock. Contrast levels had to be boosted or dropped for each shot, turning once-unusable film into remarkable insights. Film speeds then had to be individually adjusted.
The earliest cameras were manually operated (hand-cranked) meaning the playback speeds of these thousand-or-so shots were uniquely uneven and uncomparable. Therefore each shot had to be manually synced to the appropriate sixteen-frames per second, by the trained eye of an editor, in order to ensure the men of yesteryear moved naturally. “The result,” wrote CNN’s Meron Moges-Gerbi, “is a film that restores a sense of humanity to soldiers who have long been maintained as silent, stiff, black-and-white characters.”
“All these cliché, black and white, jerky kind of figures that we don't pay much attention to anymore,” began the director, “it suddenly turns them into human beings… It changed my perception of what it was like to be a soldier in the war.”
Jackson and his team digitally restored all one-hundred hours of the Imperial War Museum’s archival footage—despite only using a small portion of it—and they did so for free, “just to get their archive in better shape.” He said, “I think it’s the best gift I can give at the moment—as well as this movie—to restore footage.”
Diane Lees, Head of the Imperial War Museum, believed Jackson’s generosity would greatly empower the museum’s ability to educate. “I think for the younger generation,” she said, “the idea that you can consign anything that's black and white to being ‘history’ and not really connected to you has been one of the challenges that we've faced.”
Furthermore, it must be said, Peter Jackson devoted himself to this project for over three years at no cost. He took no paycheck for his directorial labors, instead using the opportunity to honor his grandfather, who had served in the Great War. He had been raised on his father’s retellings of his grandfather’s war stories, and making this film gave him, what he called, “a greater understanding of what my grandfather would have gone through.”
“My grandfather was wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme,” he said. Sergeant William Jackson was felled in a charge to overtake a German machine gun position. He was shipped back to England to recuperate; there, he met and married a nurse, on to produce Peter Jackson’s father before returning to the Western Front. “Everybody's got some stories like that.”
Digital restoration made the footage viable but it still had two glaring problems: foremost, it was in monochrome. Jackson understood that retelling the personal side of war, from a position of relatability, meant we audiences needed to see the world as the soldiers did. “They saw a war in color; 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.”
With an elite team of colorizers, Jackson was able to revitalize his black-and-white documentary with the colors of the natural world. Dozens of authentic WWI uniforms were taken on loan from the museum to be studied; a day was spent in the countryside with live-fire artillery; and scores of books were rented as reference guides for the colors of badges, buttons, signs, bricks, skin, grass, metal, mud, and the implements of war.
The end product is breathtakingly beautiful and realistic. By the end of my viewing, I had to remind myself that all of the footage had originally been scratched, faded, and tarnished, monochromatic filing cabinet fodder. If nothing else, “They Shall Not Grow Old” should be revered and praised for their immaculate restoration; for bringing the dead back to life.
“The purpose of the film was to try and use modern technology, not modern film,” Jackson said. “We can easily go out and shoot reconstructions and all that, but we didn't do that. We used strictly hundred-year-old footage, but we used computer firepower to restore it to the maximum degree that we could… By [erasing] the technical limitations of hundred-year-old cinema, we can see and hear the Great War as they experienced it.”
Restoration and colorization were incredible boons to the documentary, but there still remained one major issue: sound—or rather, a lack of sound. No audio had been produced by the documentarians of the First World War as the technology to do so did not yet exist. Whereas most documentarians would have been deterred by this hurdle, Peter Jackson was inspired.
He hired forensic lip-readers to determine what the soldiers were saying—those in focus and in the background—and he hired actors to recreate the dialogue. Expert foley artists fabricated the sounds of boots slogging through mud, heavy packs rustling in travel, glass bottles tinkling, nails hammered into wood; guns clinking and firing; artillery loading and thundering; shells whistling overhead, men shivering, and shovels digging-up earth. The end result is phenomenal.
You are transported to the battlelines, into the trenches, staring into the eyes of men who look just like yourself, if only withdrawn. “The clarity was such that these soldiers on the film came alive,” said the director. “Their humanity just jumped out at you. This footage has been around for a hundred years and these men had been buried behind a fog of damage; a mask of grain and jerkiness and sped-up film. Once restored, it’s the human aspect that you gain the most.”
The colors and sounds of soldiers at war and at play breathe life into once-indiscernible footage. Men sing in choruses, kindle fires, eat, sleep, wrestle, shuffle, and trudge. They play with dogs, rugby balls, and wooden posts. They give orders; they notice the cameraman; they have conversations. They had been silent for a hundred years, but no longer; now, they have voices.
Without a narration, the story is told through successive audio excerpts from one-hundred and twenty of the war’s survivors. Jackson’s team reviewed over six-hundred hours of interviews from nearly two-hundred veterans, recorded by the BBC and IWM throughout the 1960s and 70s. Names, dates, and locations were withheld until the credits, in order to keep the retelling general, so as to typify the average soldier’s experience: Britain’s entry, the enlistment of men, training, and deployment; the trenches, defenses, shelling, combat; living conditions, disease, death, fear; artillery, gas, bayonets, and war machines; raids across no-man’s-land, prisoners, and compassion, followed by the sudden relief of war’s end.
We are then reminded of the costs extracted by such wars, as attributions to these long-deceased veterans indicate a mere handful of the few thousand survivors among millions purposelessly killed in a war now largely forgotten. The title of the film descends from a line of a 1914 poem by Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen,” which is often used in remembrance of the Great War’s lost souls. “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.”
The last of the film’s accreditation sequence is followed by the cheeky caveat “This film was shot on location on the Western Front, 1914-1918.”
My wife and I saw the matinee showing of “They Shall Not Grow Old” on the first night of its American release. It had premiered in London two months prior, airing on BBC at the exact moment of the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, on November 11, 2018. Its limited American release began with on December 17, with the majority of showings in 3D.
I must say, the third-dimension is typically a gimmick in modern cinema, but this was not the case for “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Such depth added to tracking shots, pans, and portraits has the effect of pulling you deeper into the trenches. You will be so immersed you will forget to eat your popcorn. Nothing is glamorized, but neither is it withheld.
As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian said, “The effect is electrifying. The soldiers are returned to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes, like ghosts or figures summoned up in a seance.” He awarded it a full five-star review. The hard-to-please IMDb crowd (myself included) have given it a total 8.7/10; Metacritic’s amalgamated critical review puts it at 91/100, indicating “universal acclaim;” meanwhile, Rotten Tomatoes has it at a 98% approval rating.
As a film, I would award it a 10/10; a “must-see on the big screen” kind of film. As a directorial achievement—especially for a documentary—it deserves nothing more than full praise. “They Shall Not Grow Old” is truly breathtaking. As Guy Lode of Variety wrote, the film’s “greatest revelation isn’t one of sound and fury. Rather, it’s the film’s faces that stick longest in the mind… [These] soldiers turn from cold statistics to warm, quivering human beings, drawing us with renewed empathy into a Great War that, they all but unanimously agree, had precious little greatness to it.”
While waiting in line to redeem our tickets (and to order popcorn) we overheard a gaggle of kids complaining about the crowd. It seemed they were perplexed that so many non-high schoolers were interested in seeing a documentary about “dead nobodies” in a war “that doesn’t even matter.” They were, as we soon heard, only purchasing tickets to fulfill an extra credit assignment at school: thirty bonus points for seeing the film.
I felt angry and ashamed for the youth who knew not the importance of what they were walking into. The Great War is a complex, sombering, and humanizing series of events that permanently changed more than it didn’t—politically, culturally, and socioeconomically. Borders were redrawn, national identities were rewritten, industries were revolutionized, and the Lost Generation to follow forged new standards for entertainment and expression. Without the Great War, there would’ve been no fascism in the 1930s; no Holocaust; no atom bomb; no computer processor; no Cold War; no entanglement in the Middle East; no 9/11; no iPod; and so on…
I can only hope that a few of those dozen schoolkids left the theater with a little more regard and interest for one of history’s most destructive and influential episodes. As Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “this innovative documentary is a…lesson in how to bring the past vividly alive.” Furthermore, the eminence of “They Shall Not Grow Old” “suggests new cinematic methods of rescuing history from history books, humanizing and dramatizing true stories,” just as I’ve hoped to do here, with OpenArticle.
On its opening weekend in America, “They Shall Not Grow Old” garnered $1.4 million at the box office, bringing total profits up to $3.7 million. For Fathom Events, the organizer of the limited US release, this was their largest-ever box office opening for a documentary, and their fourth-largest of all time. The film will open at eight hundred more locations after Christmas, for two more showings, with a further extension in early February of next year.
I highly recommend you see it.
Arguably the Best Picture of the year, and undoubtedly the Best Documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old” is incidentally ineligible for Academy Awards in 2019, as the producers had not filed for consideration early enough. Given the lateness of its release in 2018, it will also be ineligible for the 2020 Academy Awards.
Though this bureaucratic misfortune upsets me deeply, in my heart—and by my intuitive, critical analysis—I know that Peter Jackson has earned the awards for Best Director, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Documentary, with unquestionable nominations for Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Effects, and Best Picture.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
— Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen,” c.1914