They Shall Not Grow Old [Review by Haus]

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Thus spake Plato (or George Santayana, depending how much you trust General MacArthur’s attribution). And until Peter Jackson’s marvelous They Shall Not Grow Old, one might reasonably have said that only the dead have truly seen The Great War.

No longer.

To mark the centennial of the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Peter Jackson (yes, that one) has created an unlikely masterpiece: By bringing to bear his sizable quiver of Hobbit-honed digital wizardry (and his own wholly orthogonal fascination with WWI memorabilia), Jackson and his team have painstakingly restored, speed-corrected, and colorized some hundred-odd hours of World War I archival footage from the Imperial War Museum in Britain, and crafted a war documentary like no other.

The lavish attention to detail of this restoration effort gives Jackson substantial money in the bank, and he chooses to spend it all on the British forces in the Western Front. This is wise: Rather than hopping piecemeal between different aspects of the war (the home front, the air corps, nurses, and so forth), Jackson focuses on spinning a sort of everyman narrative of English boys in (and near) the trenches.

They Shall Not Grow Old is neither a scholarly work of history, nor is it a traditional documentary as such. Rather, Jackson relies entirely on his patchwork of restored clips and first-person spoken narratives (these too drawn from archival interviews, recorded some fifty years ago). There are no talking heads from Oxbridge, fancy graphics, or orchestral crescendos — just a simplified meta-telling of the day-to-day life of the war. And while we are used to easily digestible and expertly parsed bites of curated history, Jackson’s approach is both human and honest — this was an everyman’s war, after all.

It’s a welcome tack. The First World War has for me always seemed a compelling yet very faraway thing, a time to be imagined through red poppies and poems and jittery high-speed newsreels and history texts. So it’s hard to overstate the pure visceral power of simply seeing these gaggles of muddy teens a hundred years ago trudging, stumbling, grinning, and horsing around like anyone we know. Everyone should see this film for the sublime wake-up call of seeing these young soldiers, finally, not as speed-walking blurs but as they truly were. That alone is what drew me in, and that alone is enough.

You should basically set aside what you’re doing and see this film straight away (if you can), so I won’t beat a dead horse (and if you go, you’ll see several).

But, a couple of points:

(1) As a war movie, They Shall Not Grow Old slots in nicely beside Dunkirk — both expertly harness the power of modern film to make old wars immediate and personal and real. This on its own has value: Not least, you’ll walk out feeling as though you now share at least a tiny grasp of the memories some veterans must have had.

(2) Jackson has no particular agenda or slant, other than the one inherent in his choice of the British as a subject. It’s not preachy one way or another. He lets the story tell itself.

(3) Everyone pictured or heard in this film surely is, by now, long gone. This lends the movie an otherworldly air, like a warning from beyond the grave. Which, being fair, it unquestionably is.

(4) Jackson does play with the coloring a bit, dipping into the full and vivid restoration only when we ‘arrive’ at the front — and slipping back into B&W as we ‘leave’ at the end. More than just an arty gimmick, this sets up a stark contrast between the experience on the Front on one hand, and the way even contemporary civilians saw the war on the other. (This, of course, remains a divide that even the recent fashion of ’embedded journalists’ can’t possibly hope to bridge. I’m sure this disconnect is just as familiar to soldiers today as to their compatriots in WWI and throughout history.)

(5) Stay til the end, not for some Marvel-esque teaser, but for a fascinating half-hour “making of” in which Jackson steps through the process and decisions that went into this film. Necessary.

Technical marvels aside (and there are many), the whole also exceeds the sum of its parts. This will be rightly studied by generations. See it.

Haus Verdict: They Shall Not Grow Old is sui generis, a masterpiece of popular history offering perhaps our first face-to-face view with the full-color reality of the Western Front.

They Shall Not Grow Old had limited release screening starting in late December, and opens in 25 markets on February 1.

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