Mark Reviews Movies: THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 17, 2018

The last known veteran of the Great War died in 2012 at the age of 110. She was Florence Green, a member of Women's Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom. It's important to remember this, if only because the voices we hear throughout They Shall Not Grow Old are no longer with us. They live on, though, in director Peter Jackson's documentary, a staggering technical achievement that brings those voices to vivid life.

The voices of dozens of World War I veterans make up the film's entire storytelling enterprise, which begins just before the outbreak of the war and carries through all the way until after its completion. The film runs less than 100 minutes, including its lengthy credits, which give due credit to each and every voice we hear throughout the narrative. It is not a complete picture of the war, of course, because such an endeavor would be almost impossible as a straightforward narrative of linear chronology.

Jackson doesn't try. His focus is entirely on the experience of veterans from the United Kingdom, and even that restriction is narrowed further, only including soldiers who fought on the front lines.

Even with—or maybe because of—this limited view of the war, the film is extensive in its observations of what it was like to be there on the Western Front, fighting in the trenches of France and making slow advances toward Belgium.

There are no dates provided. Time simply moves forward at a clip, as the years blend together with seemingly minimal progress being made. Jackson does not offer up specific locales or anything of the sort. The soldiers recognize the landmarks of Paris upon arrival, but from there, it is an anonymous collection of towns and villages. Beyond that, there are the stretches of the trenches and the cratered dirt of no man's land. An aerial photograph of one trench system is really our only way of comprehending the geography, and even then, we're never certain of its specific location.

That was part of these soldiers' experience. Before volunteering for combat, these were men who spent all of their relatively short lives in their home country. They had little to no knowledge of the world beyond their island. As for dates, there was no reason to keep track of them. The occasion of a momentous battle is only recognized in retrospect. In the moment, it is simply an incalculable amount of time spent in terror or in a haze of adrenaline, after spending even more time simply waiting for the fighting to commence. A repeated refrain from multiple veterans is that they weren't fighting for some great cause. They were simply doing a job. If that job meant dying, they were prepared for that.

The film's great achievement, though, isn't in the narrative, which flows freely in an almost stream-of-consciousness sort of way. The subject of dead bodies—littering the expanse of the land between the trenches of the Allied and Central Powers, splayed out on barbed wire, or collected within the trenches themselves—brings up the topic of rats. Water, a scarce resource boiled in gasoline cans for tea, raises the subject of rain, which was a salvation (no taste of gasoline in that) and a detriment, because of flooding and the resulting anatomical horror of trench foot.

The primary achievement here is how Jackson brings these stories to life, using rare and restored archival film from the era. The director has long been a master in the realm of technology, and whatever one may think of his use (or, in some of his more recent efforts, abuse) of technology (from effortless incorporation of and innovative leaps in visual effects to toying with 3-D and frame rates), his work here—bolstered by a dedicated team of restorers and artists—might be his important effort on that front.

For here, we have some of the clearest and richest moving imagery that has existed from the time and the events of the Great War. In some respects, it's almost unfair to label the film as a simple documentary. In a way, it serves as a living monument to the memories of these soldiers, whose names we only learn in the credits, whose voices are left unidentified, and whose faces might appear within the footage—although we'd never know. Jackson isn't telling the story of certain soldiers. In these voices and through these faces, as distinct as any faces are in modern movies, we receive the story of the British Soldier in World War I.

More to the point, the technology itself is a key component of the narrative. The images begin displayed within a small window at the center of the frame. The archival components also have been converted into 3-D, although it is never showy. The 3-D effect at the start is subtle, so that the images within the small window are a certain distance within the square—almost in the vein of a shadow box frame. There's an intentional distance, not only between us and the images, but also of the images and the film itself.

As the soldiers learn of the outbreak of the war (caused by, as one veteran puts it, some stuff involving Russia and the murder of some Austrian archduke) and line up to volunteer, the frame within the frame grows. We see the training process. We see the marches through London, gathering up men who follow the parade in order to recruit at a local office. The images continue to grow and grow.

Upon the soldiers' arrival in France, the archival footage now fills the film's entire frame—cropped but with no obvious loss of detail or information. The images, previously retaining the further distance of being in their original black-and-white, are now colorized. The 3-D—so barely perceptible up until then—now provides us with multiple layers of perspective. We can judge the depth of the passages of the trenches. We bear witness to the impact of the weaponry of the time.

Most importantly, we can see those faces, looking at the camera and, by extent, at us—crossing the seemingly impossible gap of 100 years. The effect is astonishing, and it makes They Shall Not Grow Old far more than some collection of footage or a museum piece.

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