Movie Review: They Shall Not Grow Old

Short and sweet: it's a 99 minute WWI documentary, made up of meticulously restored film clips, still photographs, and 60 year old recorded reminisces by veterans.  It respectfully shows the British soldiers' side of the war, from joining up, through training, deployment, hazards of the trenches, hazards of R&R, going 'over the top,' dealing with German P.O.W.s, the end of the war, and re-entry into post-war everyday society.

Comments and clips prior to the initial UK rerelease were blogged here back in October.  Go see for yourself, especially to click through to the film trailer and to hear an interview with Peter Jackson.

So, the two questions I had going in were: How well does it all work together?  And how does the restoration look on the big screen?  To answer the first, it's very good but not outstanding.  Anyone familiar with WWI has read about and seen photos of the hell of trench warfare, and this doesn't really present any truly new material.  However, where this movie shines is how the restoration brings the war into a much more relatable visual focus for modern audiences.  It sweeps away the noise and debris of time and archaic film technology, allowing us to see the soldiers as humans, not merely as the almost comic herky-jerky shadow figures that the cameras of the time turned them into.  That is the value Jackson and his team bring, and this is what makes this whole project worthwhile.

A small warning though, one that probably isn't needed but I feel compelled to say it anyway: There's a lot of restored battlefield gore here.  It's unavoidable and is not overwhelming for adults, but don't take the pre-teen set to this one.

One more thing to note, the full color restoration is only given to the segments filmed in France, with the portions shot in England largely left in their original form.  It's sort of a Wizard of Oz cinematography twist on things, where the war zone is the real world in living color, but back home things are still black-and-white.  It's an understandable choice, if only to allow resources to be concentrated on the war footage.

Back to the second question, about how it looks on the big screen.  It's good, but it's not super high definition viewing.  Overall, the main images of men and objects such as artillery are stable and devoid of image artifacts and noise, at least in the large scale.  However some of the texturing of uniformly colored objects, especially helmets, has a slightly disconcerting tendency to "swim," probably as a side-effect of the frame interpolation software used.  This doesn't show up in the small youtube clips, but on a big screen it's very noticeable.  But it's not bad, and in a lot of cases the original film was in pretty rough shape to begin with.   Retouching these images any more aggressively would probably breach the bounds of "restoration" and plunge into "CGI re-creation."  Jackson and company made the right calls on holding that line here, and I think it'll look just about right on a normal-sized home screen.

Which brings me to the two real questions: how many stars, and will I buy the disk version?  4 of 5 Stars and Yes.

Final Note: The next and only remaining U.S. viewing is upcoming on Dec. 27.  Check your local times, or resign yourself to waiting on the disk release.