WWTBAM Bored

Mrs. SSS and I went to see the documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old today and it's an amazing experience. The British Imperial War Museum gave Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings) access to over 100 hours of vintage footage and 600 hours of interviews made in the 1960s and 70s with actual World War I veterans. Jackson put it together into this documentary that recreates the experience of the soldiers on the Western front from enlistment and training through the years in the trenches. There isn't any footage of the major battles because the cameramen weren't taking part in the charges (instead they show some magazine drawings of battlefield scenes), but just about everything else is depicted in greater detail than I've ever seen before. Each scene features a number of the actual soldiers talking about that aspect of the war (like the food or their uniforms) accompanied by appropriate video footage.

After the documentary, there is a 30-minute feature in which Jackson describes how he made the film. He was able to clean up the existing footage (much of which had been unusable previously), get the camera speeds slowed down to actual time instead of the herky-jerky newsreel footage you often see and even zoom in on a number of shots to get greater detail of the soldiers' faces. He also colorized the film, recreated sound effects and even brought voice actors in to dub in the lines the soldiers were saying on the footage. Much of this footage hasn't been seen before because the film simply wasn't in good enough shape to view before Jackson restored it.

The movie was shown a couple of times as a Fathom Events special but is now playing in various cities in general release. Unfortunately, it's not eligible for the Best Documentary Oscar for some technical reasons, but it's certainly as good as any documentary out there.

silverscreenselect wrote:Mrs. SSS and I went to see the documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old today and it's an amazing experience. The British Imperial War Museum gave Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings) access to over 100 hours of vintage footage and 600 hours of interviews made in the 1960s and 70s with actual World War I veterans. Jackson put it together into this documentary that recreates the experience of the soldiers on the Western front from enlistment and training through the years in the trenches. There isn't any footage of the major battles because the cameramen weren't taking part in the charges (instead they show some magazine drawings of battlefield scenes), but just about everything else is depicted in greater detail than I've ever seen before. Each scene features a number of the actual soldiers talking about that aspect of the war (like the food or their uniforms) accompanied by appropriate video footage.

After the documentary, there is a 30-minute feature in which Jackson describes how he made the film. He was able to clean up the existing footage (much of which had been unusable previously), get the camera speeds slowed down to actual time instead of the herky-jerky newsreel footage you often see and even zoom in on a number of shots to get greater detail of the soldiers' faces. He also colorized the film, recreated sound effects and even brought voice actors in to dub in the lines the soldiers were saying on the footage. Much of this footage hasn't been seen before because the film simply wasn't in good enough shape to view before Jackson restored it.

The movie was shown a couple of times as a Fathom Events special but is now playing in various cities in general release. Unfortunately, it's not eligible for the Best Documentary Oscar for some technical reasons, but it's certainly as good as any documentary out there.

I want to see this.

There's one scene in which an officer is reading a letter to a group of enlisted men. Jackson couldn't trust the lip readers to get all of his talk perfectly accurate so he did research to find out what the unit was and the date the film was made (it was the day before the Battle of the Somme). Then he searched through the archives until he found the actual memo that the officer was reading and brought it an actor to read it in time with the officer's lips.

Yeah, hopefully it is in a theater close to me-but doubtful.

Either way I will buy it ASAP.

I have read that we are seeing the guys taken the day before the Battle of the Somme the day before they died.