Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal, Jan 29, 2019; see also “Janus-Faced Public Diplomacy: Creel and Lippmann During the Great War," article in
‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ aims to bring World War I to life by colorizing historical film, adding a soundtrack and more, but does Peter Jackson’s documentary go too far?
Image from article, with caption:
A restored and colorized image from Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary ‘They Shall Not Grow Old.’
Few things are rarer than a big-screen documentary that receives wildly enthusiastic mass-media attention—especially one whose subject is something that happened a century ago. But “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary, which was screened in selecte U.S. theaters by Fathom Events earlier this month, got so much favorable press that starting on Friday it will be shown at 500 theaters in 150 North American markets. If it got any bad reviews, I didn’t see them, and when I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, I was stunned by the compulsive power of its extraordinarily vivid portrait of life in the frontline trenches.
Even so, certain critics have expressed lingering reservations about the extent to which Mr. Jackson has digitally altered the archival film footage supplied by London’s Imperial War Museum on which “They Shall Not Grow Old” is based. Adam Gopnik, for instance, wrote in a largely admiring New Yorker review of the film that such alteration inevitably raises “unsettling questions” about its underlying authenticity. He has a point, too: Not only has most of the footage been colorized, but Mr. Jackson has changed it in other ways, adding a soundtrack, correcting the speed at which it is shown, reconfiguring parts of certain scenes to make them resemble the camerawork you’d see in a modern movie and, most surprisingly, incorporating a 3-D effect (though many screenings are “flat”).
None of this bothered me while I was watching “They Shall Not Grow Old.” But as I reflected on what I’d seen, I found myself asking: Has Mr. Jackson gone too far? Can any movie that manipulates archival footage so extensively be trusted as a historical document? This is especially important because the popular success of “They Shall Not Grow Old” means that it will henceforth become the gold standard for documentaries based on historical film footage. So let’s take a closer look at what Mr. Jackson has done—and not done:
Soldiers during World War I as seen in ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ PHOTO: FATHOM EVENTS/EVERETT COLLECTION
• Restoration. The footage seen in “They Shall Not Grow Old” was shot with old-fashioned hand-cranked cameras. As a result, the speed is extremely erratic, and the film stock itself has deteriorated significantly over time. Mr. Jackson has corrected the projection speeds, and he has also subjected the film to meticulous digital restoration. In both cases, though, he has sought only to make the clips look the way they did when they were first shown in theaters a century ago.
• Enhancement. In addition, all of the frontline footage has been colorized and enlarged to fit today’s large screens. Here, by contrast, the goal was to make the results look more “real” than the original black-and-white footage. In Mr. Jackson’s words, “The soldiers...didn’t see this war in black and white, they saw it in color.”
• Re-creation. To the same end, Mr. Jackson has also added an elaborate soundtrack to the originally silent footage, one that is full of crowd noises and other sound effects (including gunfire and bursting artillery shells). For one unforgettable sequence in which an officer is seen reading a written order to his men, researchers managed to track down the actual text of the order in the Imperial War Museum. Mr. Jackson then had a voice actor with the correct regional accent overdub the order, thereby creating the uncanny illusion that the officer is actually heard speaking on the soundtrack.
No attempt, however, has been made to go further than that: Unlike postmodern documentaries like Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” that incorporate dramatized re-constructions of the events they purport to portray, “They Shall Not Grow Old” is not fictionalized in any way. Indeed, it is “narrated” by World War I veterans who were interviewed years later about their wartime experiences and whose actual voices are heard on the soundtrack.
Soldiers during World War I as seen in ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ PHOTO: FATHOM EVENTS/EVERETT COLLECTION
This last fact is crucial to judging Mr. Jackson’s film, not least because it is a documentary and not a docudrama, which is a work of fact-based fiction. Most viewers, I think, grasp the latter distinction instinctively, but the power of photography to create an illusion of reality can undercut that understanding. This is especially true when gifted actors impersonate well-known historical figures, as Gary Oldman did when he played Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour,” a docudrama that moves freely between historically grounded re-creation and outright fictionalization. “They Shall Not Grow Old,” by contrast, is a dead-serious attempt to enlist digital technology in the service of historical truth, and deserves to be judged by that high standard.
How does it measure up? Quite astonishingly well. To be sure, you’ll have a problem with the film if you object on principle to the use of colorization and re-created sound effects. But it is an iron law of technology that what can be done, will be done, and I don’t regard either technique as disqualifying in any case, especially when they’re used with the acute sensitivity to matters of historical fact that is on display throughout “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Even if you’re suspicious going in, I expect that you’ll soon throw aside all reservations and let Mr. Jackson’s film cast its overwhelming spell. To see it is to know as well as we can ever know what it felt like to huddle in the trenches of Ypres and the Somme, shivering with cold and fear. Perhaps “They Shall Not Grow Old” isn’t totally true to that harrowing experience—but it’s much more than close enough to be believed.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings,” a column about the arts, twice monthly. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
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