![]() Men are shown playing soccer, drinking warm beer and posing with captured German spiked helmets. Scenes in rest areas behind the front lines show the pleasure troops took in even short respites from combat. It focuses, as Jackson has said, "on the experience of an average soldier infantryman on the Western Front." The result is by no means a history of the entire war. The museum supplied Jackson with about 100 hours of archival footage, which his operatives spent three years restoring, winnowing and colorizing. The film was generated by a project of Britain's Imperial War Museum to commemorate the centennial of World War I. His grandfather was a career British soldier who survived the entire four years of combat. Jackson, director of the wildly popular (and to some critics, interminable) Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, is a New Zealander long absorbed in World War I history. One element lacking, and thankfully so, is the horrific stench of death and decay - a miasma that would overpower refined 21st-century noses. Given the unvarnished realism of such filmed images as plump rats rummaging among skeletal human remains, my wife, Marcia, (by no means squeamish) found herself sometimes averting her eyes. If anything, the illustrations add to the movie's mystique of menace and doom. So Jackson's documentary, which uses black-and-white footage of the soldiers in homeland training before deploying lifelike color (in 3-D) once they're in France, depicts actual close combat via artists' sketches from British periodicals. The British cameramen with their bulky gear were not ordered (luckily for them) to follow attacking Tommies from the trenches into the German machine-gun fire. On the Menin Gate in the Belgian city of Ypres are recorded 54,395 British Commonwealth victims with no known grave. A towering monument at Thiepval on the Somme lists 72,337 British and South African dead, most of them pulverized by artillery fire. The sights I've seen over the decades speak to the high-explosive carnage that blew to pieces so many British soldiers, as well as French and Germans - and late in the war, also Americans. But as a consummate traveler and a persistent dabbler in military history, I have visited dozens of battlefields, museums, cemeteries and other monuments from what was so wrongly imagined as "the War to End All Wars." Jackson's film shook me to the core by personifying the names inscribed at those century-old memorials to mass death. I praise this film as someone who rarely writes a movie review. In Jackson's masterpiece, we meet them face to face - sometimes as putrefying corpses. They include some of the 512,000 Britons who perished there, along with the 1.5 million wounded. They're among the nation's 5.4 million people who fought in France and Belgium from 1914 to 1918. The British soldiers who populate They Shall Not Grow Old are real people (many displaying that era's rotting teeth). The last part of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is splattered with gory snippets of Vietnam War action.īut those memorable movies are all works of fiction. Bodies shattered by shelling imbue the opening of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan with the brutality of World War II combat. These you-are-there images, shot during the Great War in scratchy black and white but transformed by 21st-century computer wizardry into crisp color footage, give a ghastly twist to the notion of "virtual reality."Ĭlassic World War I films include All Quiet on the Western Front, spun from Erich Maria Remarque's novel Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. The visceral impact of this digital-age documentary directed by Peter Jackson comes as close to planting viewers in the Western Front trenches as any footage could achieve - and with scenes more gruesome than some in the audience might desire. It is surely the World War I movie to end all World War I movies. They Shall Not Grow Old could fairly be labeled The War Movie to End All War Movies.
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