A gut-punch moment of cinematic honesty

‘Hobbit’ filmmaker’s vivid, haunting testimony of 150 Western Front witnesses made for essential viewing

ONE HUNDRED years since the guns fell silent, a blockbuster filmmaker best known for putting hairy-footed Hobbits on screen has delivered one the most powerful contemporary tributes to the First World War generation.

Despite its Hollywood provenance, the Armistice Day broadcast of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old on BBC Two was a gut-punch commemoration of those who gave so much in the conflict. It was also a riposte to the temptation to glorify or sentimentalise four years of misery, bravery and death in the trenches.

To anyone who lives in the world shaped by the war – that would be all of us – They Shall Not Grow Old qualifies as essential viewing.

For young people – many of whom are perhaps hazily aware of the events of 1914–18 – it especially opens a window to the past.

With the same flair for epic storytelling that defined his Lord of the Rings adaptations, Jackson has taken the spoken testimony of 150 Western Front eyewitnesses and overlaid it with footage from the Imperial War Museums (its co-commissioners, along with 14-18 Now and the BBC). To this he has added remarkably vivid colour and sound-effects – stripping away the flickering black and white in which the collective memory of the Great War is framed, bringing the struggle wrenchingly to life.

The true importance of They Shall Not Grow Old goes beyond mere technical prowess, however. The film, which also has a widespread cinema release, testifies movingly to the inhumanity of war.

Jackson does not stint in evoking the squalor of the front – vermin infests the muck, barbed-wire snakes into the horizon, soldiers glance warily at the camera, their knee-jerk jauntiness failing to paper over the pinched, haunted expressions beneath. We see the troops for what they were: ordinary men enduring living hell in the name of freedom.

They Shall Not Grow Old carries a “15” rating – indicating just how uncompromising Jackson is in evoking the pity, and the unremitting cruelty, of war. But it is from this very unflinchingness that it draws its power. Never before, it can be argued, has the scale, the awfulness, the grinding cost of the First World War been so vividly conjured.

With They Shall Not Grow Old Jackson has presented the nation with a remarkable gift – 99 minutes of horror, tragedy and courage rendered with a master film-maker’s touch.

It is an act of bearing witness that demands to be seen.