They Shall Not Grow Old

[Weatherman2020]

Peter Jackson (Hobbit Series) had a grandfather who served in WW1. So he dedicated his time and resources to save WW1 footage. Using computers to smooth and colorize, lip readers to recreate the voices, and watching old footage of interviews with WW1 Vets he put together this documentary. He brought these men back to life.

Plays only two days in December in the theaters. My Grandfather was also over-there fighting, so I’m very interested in seeing this.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Saw it tonight. Jackson did a fantastic job. Hundreds of hours of archive film, most of it in poor condition, condensed and arranged into a great documentary. After the show Jackson gave a half hour insight into the making of it.

The odds are you also have a relative who served in WW1, so well worth seeing.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Peter Jackson (Hobbit Series) had a grandfather who served in WW1. So he dedicated his time and resources to save WW1 footage. Using computers to smooth and colorize, lip readers to recreate the voices, and watching old footage of interviews with WW1 Vets he put together this documentary. He brought these men back to life.

Plays only two days in December in the theaters. My Grandfather was also over-there fighting, so I’m very interested in seeing this.

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Another review. Remember it plays again on 12/27.

“Jackson’s film portrays the World War I soldier as you have never seen him: in color, in high definition and with sound. They Shall Not Grow Old painstakingly cleans up the old jerky films of the Great War. . . . We journey forward to the trenches, where the rats and the corpses and the men all live as one. They eat, and live and die on top of each other, all in high definition color. Men slip into the mud and vanish forever. Brown iodine is swabbed on bleeding arms shot cleanly through by German bullets. A parade of the gassed march by with their arms on the shoulders of the man ahead. These are real people, something the old black and white films of course contained. But somehow, that medium dehumanized them. They Shall Not Grow Old brings them alive, like we have a pass to visit them in Flanders and Passchendaele. The film is a memorial to the World War I solider perhaps more profound than the Cenotaph.”

They Shall Not Grow Old: Peter Jackson's Masterpiece War Memorial

 

[whitehall]

It's amazing what modern technology can do for old archive film which may have been classified for half a century.

 

[Weatherman2020]

It's amazing what modern technology can do for old archive film which may have been classified for half a century.

They had hundreds of hours of film, I’m interested in seeing what they didn’t use in the documentary.

 

[anotherlife]

My grandfather's grandfather was an officer of the Austro-Hungarian military. Would be nice to have this film expanded to work on the axis powers side too.

Ww1 is fascinating, the most important war in the entire human history, the war that turned it all upside down for the entire future of all people.

 

[boedicca]

mr. boe and I saw "They Shall Not Grow Old" yesterday. It was wonderful - so touching, heartwarming, horrifying and heartbreaking all together. Peter Jackson did a fantastic job using archival footage and audio to bring the average infrantryman's life alive. I highly recommend it.

 

[Picaro]

Peter Jackson (Hobbit Series) had a grandfather who served in WW1. So he dedicated his time and resources to save WW1 footage. Using computers to smooth and colorize, lip readers to recreate the voices, and watching old footage of interviews with WW1 Vets he put together this documentary. He brought these men back to life.

Plays only two days in December in the theaters. My Grandfather was also over-there fighting, so I’m very interested in seeing this.

Thanks for the heads up; I want to see this. My grandfather on my Dad's side was there, too, only he was Quartermaster Corps and lucky enough to be out of the trenches. Lots of stories about those old trucks back then. And how much stuff we left behind, including all those trucks; we left thousands of them behind, and gave the French an entire trucking industry for free.

 

[Picaro]

My grandfather's grandfather was an officer of the Austro-Hungarian military. Would be nice to have this film expanded to work on the axis powers side too.

Ww1 is fascinating, the most important war in the entire human history, the war that turned it all upside down for the entire future of all people.

You might like this book:

Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy by David Stevenson

Heavy reading, not a popular history, but an excellent academic reference of the war.