They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

[enoughcats]

Peter Jackson has used modern technology to create a true documentary about WWI and the soldiers who were there, in pictures and their own words.  He has sharpened imagery and colorized some of it to present WWI to generations that have onlys seen grainy images.

His images look as if they were shot yesterday and you see the soldiers' faces clearly and their personalities often shine through.

It will be presented at the London Film festival and then hopefully be widely released

.Peter Jackson's latest

[enoughcats]

After extremely limited release in the USA, there is a mid January wider release in three or four major cities.  That will be followed by a wider release the first of February.  Somehow they not only sharpened fuzzy images, and colorized them, but they also converted them to 3-D. 

[Danny Franks]

It's an incredibly powerful piece of film. The restored, colourised footage brings the war to grisly, genuinely uncomfortable light. When you look at some of the old archive footage, there was a lot that was indistinct, you couldn't really tell what you were looking at - a mound of earth and mud? Now you can see that, no, it's a pile of dead horses, clearly killed in explosions and left to rot. You can see the faces of the human dead, the torn up bodies. It's the closest to being able to see the reality of life on the Western Front that I think I've ever known.

[enoughcats]

Link for Monday, January 21 showings with a search function by zipcode. 

[Browncoat]

I finally got to see this tonight, and wow.  I really loved the format with the voiceovers/interviews pairing so well with the actual footage of the war.  They did an outstanding job with the restoration and colorization of the film.  Some of the footage was horribly gruesome, but I think it was a good choice to show the true horrors of war.

[Notwisconsin]

It was only the fourth war to be filmed (Spanish American, Boer, and the Mexican Revolution) and there were no oral histories made of those. So this is the first totally recorded modern war.

That said, it was excellent.

[VCRTracking]

Just watched it and man, that moment when the footage goes from jittery black and white to smooth color is breathtaking. Also, I think Jackson set it up very well that even though they never mention the word "Somme" I knew exactly what "the big advance" all the soldiers were preparing for was referring to.

Edited November 23, 2019 by VCRTracking

[Brn2bwild]

Remarkably, I had never seen so many dead soldiers as I did in this movie.  Somehow the distance of time made it less horrifying than it otherwise might have been.

[Danny Franks]

This is being re-released in the cinema, over here in the UK. I may have to take the opportunity to watch it on the big screen, and get as immersive an experience as possible.

[VCRTracking]

The saddest moment is when a veteran talked about seeing a fellow soldier with his left arm, left leg, and left side of his head all blown away with his left eye hanging out onto his cheek still alive and calling out for "Nanny"(must have been upper class) and shooting him to put him out of his misery. The broken way he said "I had to...and it hurt me." was just so heart-wrenching.