Sunday 14 April 2019

‘Stepping through the looking glass’: They Shall Not Grow Old review / VIDEO:They Shall Not Grow Old – New Trailer – Now Playing In Theaters






 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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