Since Peter Jackson completed his Lord of the Rings trilogy I have only fully embraced one of his films, 2005’s King Kong. The artistic and commercial success of something like that trilogy has to be difficult to follow. While The Lovely Bones looked like a good idea on paper, it was a failure on most levels. His return to Middle Earth with The Hobbit trilogy shows a filmmaker incapable of self-restraint. As low as it got, I’ve always held out hope that he would find his aesthetic footing again and apply his technical virtuosity to a project that he was in full control of.
His most recent film is a complete departure for a director that has spent a majority of his career in fantasy, horror, and adventures. They Shall Not Grow Old is a painstaking restoration of footage from World War One to create a documentary that is without politics or propaganda, it is about the men on the frontlines. He has up-converted the footage to 2k and added 3-D, something that has never been done, and then colorized it. The effect is haunting and ethereal, providing a stark immediacy to commemorate the centennial of the first world war ending.
At first, Jackson seems like an odd fit, but in the end, what makes it such an amazing feat is that it is a documentary about history told from a non-historian. The film lacks dates, or the names of battles, it is merely a look into the day to day existence during the months and years of fighting. Jackson has no talking heads, the only voices we hear are the men who fought in the war, but the interviews were conducted in the 1950s and 60s which lends a ghostly quality to footage.
The movie begins and ends with a book end. Starting in black and white 4:3 aspect ratio before stunningly expanding to fill the screen in beautiful 16:9 footage that was colorized. Traditionally I believe that footage, especially feature films, shouldn’t go through any type of color treatment that wasn’t intended by the director. When Ted Turner was converting films like It’s a Wonderful Life to color in the 1990s it was a bastardization of Frank Capra’s vision. Capra had the ability to shoot in color if he wanted, but he knew black and white was the right choice. Here, it is quite different. Jackson is taking footage and applying color to provide immediacy to lives that we have only ever seen in black and white. These men fought and died in color and by applying a realistic palette to this world, he has immersed the viewer in to the experience in ways they never have before.
The footage can be difficult to take at times. Jackson doesn’t cut away from gangrenous limbs or fields and fields of dead bodies. But, he does find space to provide full lives of humor and vitality to these men. It is almost surprising how funny the film truly is. He pauses at several moments to laugh with these men, something the documentary argues they did quite a lot to try and forget the very real danger they were in.
Something about this documentary seems to have ignited a sense of purpose in Jackson. He just announced that he will be making a documentary about The Beatles recording their album, Let it Be. With They Shall Not Grow Old, he found something that wasn’t personal to him at the outset, but in the making found the personal grip that the material had over him. He had to move so far from his typical wheelhouse to be able to make something this engaged again.
In culture we have many depictions of war, especially from Vietnam and World War Two. World War One though, seems to be largely forgotten somehow. It set the stage for the next hundred years, but it is rarely represented in film. This is a document that is built so that we can never forget.
The film runs a brisk hundred minutes, which is half what Lord of the Rings: Return of the King’s runtime was. By pairing it down to only the essential elements he has crafted something that is necessary viewing. There hasn’t been a documentary that placed you this close to the daily struggle of war since Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s haunting film Restrepo. The documentary isn’t perfect, but it is an unparalleled glimpse into the unspeakable brutality of war, but more importantly, it is a foundational look into the humanity of those who fight.