Movie Details
| Title: | They Shall Not Grow Old | |
| Director: | Peter Jackson | |
| Year: | 2018 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.22.18 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (8)
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
- King Kong
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
- The Lovely Bones
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.22.18 | Internet | From the get-go, the intent of this doc is not to give a history lesson of World War I but to present the experience of a British soldier as it was back then. For all the fact stuff like which battle was which, when the tanks came in, where they were stationed and whatnot I couldn't help but think back to listening to the hardcore history series Blueprint for Armageddon. The stuff that Dan Carlin's podcast series can't give you though is what's so special about this. For the first half hour or so, it feels like a typical documentary constructed with audio interviews over old footage. A few shots are clearly enhanced or slowed down with computers which give the imagery a liquidy movement to it that I found both noticeable and offputting. When they start to talk about the trenches though, Jackson's crazy restoration footage kicks in and I'm watching colorized, framerate-corrected footage and it seems like the footage was captured ten years ago rather than a hundred. And what's crazier is that after a while I stopped marveling at how amazing the footage looks and just took it for granted. For the footage alone, this film is remarkable. The stories that the interviewed veterans tell are quite powerful but intensify a thousand percent when you're watching actual examples of what they're talking about on the screen. Not recreations, not animation, but actual footage of dudes sleeping in flooded trenches and fields of corpses strewn amongst barren craters and lines of barbed wire. And some amazingly bad teeth. Holy shit. |
