They Shall Not Grow
Old review – an utterly breathtaking journey into the trenches
Mark Kermode's film of the week
Peter Jackson and team’s painstaking restoration of first
world war footage is a cinematic triumph that all but brings young British
soldiers back to life
Mark Kermode
Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
@KermodeMovie
Sun 11 Nov 2018 08.00 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Nov 2018
12.12 GMT
5 / 5 stars 5 out of 5 stars.
There’s a familiar
mantra that computers have somehow taken the humanity out of cinema. In an age
when it’s possible to conjure spectacular action from digital effects, many
modern movies have developed a sense of weightlessness – the inconsequentiality
of artifice. Along with Avatar director James Cameron, New Zealand film-maker
Peter Jackson has been at the forefront of the digital revolution, with his
twin Tolkien trilogies (The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) pushing the
boundaries of computer-generated entertainment.
Yet with his latest project, a revivification of the
Imperial War Museum’s archive of first world war footage, Jackson has done
something quite remarkable: using 21st-century technology to put the humanity
back into old movie stock. The result is utterly breathtaking.
Commissioned for the Armistice centenary by IWM and 14-18
NOW in association with the BBC, They Shall Not Grow Old is not a document of
the world at war. Rather, it is an arresting snapshot of the lives of British
soldiers who went to fight in Europe, many of them having lied about their
tender ages to enlist. There are no historians, narrators or political
commentators to guide us; the voices we hear are those of veterans, many
gathered by the BBC during the making of its 1964 documentary series The Great
War.
As we watch a line of soldiers marching through mud towards
the front, something extraordinary happens. The film seems almost miraculously
to change from silent black-and-white footage to colour film with sound, as
though 100 years of film history had been suddenly telescoped into a single
moment. Stepping through the looking glass, we find ourselves right there in
the trenches, surrounded by young men whose faces are as close and clear as
those of people we would pass in the street. I’ve often argued that cinema is a
time machine, but rarely has that seemed so true.
The challenges involved in achieving this miracle are
manifold. Most obviously, the digital restoration and colourisation of the
original films has been painstakingly carried out with meticulous attention to
detail, rendering everything from skin tones to scenery in impressively natural
hues. (For theatrical presentation, a moderate 3D enhancement has also been
applied.)
More complex is the correction of the film’s pace. The
century-old footage with which Jackson was working was shot at anything from 10
to 18 frames per second, with the rate often changing within a single reel.
We’ve all seen old movies projected at the modern speed of 24fps, creating that
skittering, agitated effect that fixes such footage in the dim and distant
past. Here, Jackson and his team have used computers to build interstitial
frames that recapture the rhythms of real life, tuning into the music of the
soldiers’ movements, breathing intimate life into their smallest gestures. The
process may sound nerdily technical but the effect is powerfully emotional.
It’s as if the technology had somehow pierced the surface of the film, causing
(virtual?) memories to come pouring out.
While a rich tapestry of background sound effects transports
the viewer from training camps to battlefields, actors provide regionally
authentic dialogue based on forensic lip-reading of the silent footage. “Hello
Mum!” chirrups one private as he marches past the camera. Later, we see and
hear an officer issuing instructions for the forthcoming attack.
Amid such artifice, the true archive voices of soldiers who
were “scared that the war would be over before we got out to it” strike a
vibrant chord. While the unspeakable horrors of conflict are everywhere in
evidence, Jackson’s film still finds unexpected life and laughter in the
company of those who walked in the shadow of death. One veteran remembers the
trenches as “a sort of outdoor camping holiday with the boys, with a slight
spice of danger to make it interesting”. Another recalls the “terrific lot of
kindness” at the front, a camaraderie perhaps lacking from life at home.
Should They Shall Not Grow Old be considered a documentary
or a work of art? Debates about authenticity versus invention date back to the
1916 production of The Battle of the Somme, and Jackson’s creative
interventions here will doubtless keep such arguments alive. Yet watching a
technologically enhanced sequence in which a first world war soldier playfully
juggles a beer bottle, then strums it like a guitar, all I could think was how
real, how immediate, how profoundly truthful it all felt.
As the titular (mis)quotation from Laurence Binyon’s poem
For the Fallen suggests, Jackson has attempted to take ageing footage and make
it young again – to bring history, and those who lived it, into the present. It
is an endeavour in which he has succeeded superbly.
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