Director Report Card: Peter Jackson (2018)

15. They Shall Not Grow Old

To casual film fans, it probably seems like Peter Jackson hasn't been doing much recently besides relaxing on his pile of “Lord of the Rings” residuals. While it's certainly easy to conjecture that the experience of making “The Hobbit” trilogy was traumatic for Jackson, he hasn't exactly shied away from film making. Aside from producing big budget films like “Mortal Engines,” Jackson has started creating documentaries. For the one hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, Jackson was commissioned to make a documentary about the war. Being something of an amateur historian of the Great War himself, owing to his great-grandfather being a veteran, Jackson enthusiastically took on the project.  

"They Shall Not Grow Old" attempts to show World War I as it was experienced, by the young men who fought it. The film focuses specifically on the British soldiers who were deployed. Jackson and his team took hundreds of hours of vintage newsreel footage, film and photographs taken directly at the front. Jackson blew the resolution up, meticulously colorized the footage, and added voices and sound effects. Forgoing traditional narration, Jackson instead utilized archive audio interviews with the veterans describing their unique experiences as they remembered it. 

The film begins in black and white, as it attempts to show life in England at the start of the war. The footage immediately gives you an idea of what life was like a hundred years ago. The men provide a very different perspective of going off to war than you'd expect. The young men were eager to fight. Many lied about their age, some boys as young as 14 pretending to be 19 in order to enlist. Most of the men describe being driven strictly by a sense of duty. They saw it as their jobs to go off and fight the Germans. They talk about the dehumanizing process of boot camp - endless marching, hulling hundred pound kits, eating gruel - with good humor. They all seemed to think they were going off on a grand adventure. 

Any illusions of that were quickly dismissed as soon as they arrived in the trenches. I've always heard about the unsanitary conditions the soldiers faced in World War I but "They Shall Not Grow Old" gives me an intimate idea of what it was like. Men sat on wooden bars, in a row, to defecate. All their clothes, all the men only having one outfit they could wear, were absolutely infested with lice. Dead bodies, rats, and the stink of rot was inescapable. Gangrenous trench foot - horrifying photos of which we see - was common and caused countless amputations. The constant mud and rain resulted in more than one casualty. A harrowing story is related of a man drowning in a mud slide, the other soldiers totally helpless to assist him.

Something else "They Shall Not Grow Old" keenly depicts is how tedious life in the trenches was. Death was a constant spectre, men being randomly sniped or bombs sailing overhead. Yet the men were rarely actively fighting the enemy. Instead, while always worrying about dying, the men had to find ways to pass the time. They munched on meager rations. They drank tea out of gasoline cans. Some of "They Shall Not Grow Old's" most touching footage shows soldiers finding ways to amuse themselves while away from the front. We see them singing, kicking footballs around, wrestling and joking around. One moment shows a man dropping a bottle, quickly grabbing it back up, while pantomiming music. All while men were dying only a few miles away. Life goes on, ya know? 

Death, of course, was unavoidable on the front. "They Shall Not Grow Old" shows graphic photos of dead boys, their weeping head wounds depicted in full color. The men talk about the injuries they saw, men blown to pieces by bombs and shrapnel, eyes dangling, limbs twisted off. The interviews describe this in a matter-of-fact manner, some talking about not even being immediately aware of their injuries. Yet death was not the only thing present at the time. Sometimes mercy was too. One man describes giving a German, whose throat he just slit, a final drink. More than once, a man describes putting a suffering friend out of their misery. 

Jackson managed to find footage or photos of almost everything from the trenches. Cameras, however, were not present when the fighting would overflow from the trenches. In order to illustrate this conflict, Jackson and his team uses drawings and paintings from the period. Once more, it is the words of the men who were there that most explicitly explains these circumstances. And what the men describe is pure chaos. They talk about running forward into combat, not sure why they are fighting or who they are up against. Men were falling all around them and all they could do was focus on what was right in front of them. The combination of sound effects and frenzied editing captures that feeling so clearly. 

Something that made trench warfare so different from the conflicts before and after is that the warring factions rarely saw each other. The interviewees in "They Shall Not Grow Old" discuss the few times they actually interacted with the German soldiers, when enemies were captured or after the end of the war. Most of them observe that the opposing side had no ill feelings against them. That they were mostly just doing the job assigned to them. The film gives a clear idea of what it is like, to be a normal person caught up in a conflict totally out of their control. This is also apparent in the segment about the end of the war - when the film returns to black-and-white - when the men describe the difficulties of getting used to normal civilian life again.

Jackson's decision to recolor and add sound to the archival footage was controversial among the admittedly insular World War I archivist community. Some most have thought that changing anything about the original footage was besmirching the historical document, as it existed. Yet Jackson's film brings the war to life like never before. "They Shall Not Grow Old" really gives you a sense of what it must've been like to be there. When footage of a shotgun bomb - an exploding shell that peppered the ground with bullets - is caught, you're really impressed by how carefully Jackson and his team had to search through the archives to find stuff like that. Only occasionally does the colorization process make the images feel a little uncanny. More often than not, it brings a hundred year old conflict back to life. 

The result is maybe one of the most powerful films about war that I've ever seen. By using only pre-existing documentation, Jackson has really given an impression of what it was like to actually be there. By having the men who lived through this describe their time in the trenches, the filmmakers have created about as honest a depiction of war as I think is possible. I don't think any fictionization could have ever caught the truth better. That the film does this for a conflict that is rarely discussed is especially honorable. "They Shall Not Grow Old" is an utterly engrossing, compelling, moving, and insightful documentary about one of the worst conflicts to ever scar the world. [Grade: A]