National Post (National Edition)
AN ASTONISHING WAY TO BRING THE WAR TO LIFE.
FILM REVIEW They Shall Not Grow Old
For the first 15 minutes or so, this First World War documentary from Peter Jackson is a series of comments from old veterans — themselves now dead — accompanied by the kind of degraded blackand-white under-cranked silent footage that is the way we now remember the conflict that no one now alive saw at first hand.
Then something happens. The images become sharper, 3D and rich in the natural greens and browns and greys of trench warfare. The soundtrack springs to life; we hear the soldiers speaking, and we hear the birds and (more often) bombs in the background.
We’ve been transported back to 1914, and the Great War is happening in front of us.
Jackson’s achievement is a technical one, but it ultimately becomes an emotional triumph as well. He has loosed his own army of foley and colourization artists, data wranglers, film preservationists and even lip-readers on more than 100 hours of archival footage from Britain’s Imperial War Museum, allowing us to see and hear the war as it was lived.
There is humour, like the kilted soldier who wasn’t issued army underpants and thus couldn’t ride on the top level of trams. (The war’s first commando?) Or the way rations in the trenches took on names like Lance Corporal Bacon; one stripe, you see. And we learn that, less than 20 years after the invention of motion pictures, people were already mugging for the camera and shouting “Hello mum!”
There are disturbing images as well, and so many mutilated dead bodies that you may want to think twice about making this an educational outing for the very young. One incredible sequence shows a massive piece of artillery being fired from beside a small house; with every shot, the recoil sends shingles tinkling down to the ground. And yet there’s something weirdly thrilling in seeing bright green tanks trundling through the landscape. It all looks so real. Because it is.
Jackson has made some choices here; no soldier or even location in the film is named, and aside from a rough chronological narrative of enlistment, fighting and cessation, there isn’t much of a plot. Also, the Christmas Truce doesn’t make an appearance. And the film feels a little padded by the un-enhanced opening and closing sections.
But my biggest complaint is the timing of the Canadian release. They Shall Not Grow Old — a reference to the line “They shall grow not old” in Robert Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen — first screened at the London Film Festival in October, ahead of a Nov. 9 release in Britain, just in time for the centenary of the war’s end. In Canada it’s screening just a handful of times, a month later than would be ideal. But it’s also the kind of film that demands to be seen on a big screen if you can. ∏∏∏∏∏ They Shall Not Grow Old screens Dec. 17 and Dec. 27 in select cinemas across Canada.