Noticing lxiii - Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old"

I was looking at the local movie listings this morning, thinking about going to see Ford v. Ferrari, when I noticed a special engagement of Peter Jackson's WWI homage, They Shall Not Grow Old—special as in, only three days, with the last day being today. I cajoled David into going.

So glad we did. It was an amazing accomplishment, involving four years poring over 100 hours of archival film footage and 600 hours of oral histories, constructing a story arc, modernizing the footage and colorizing much of it, to a painstakingly recreated color palette. Dialogue was identified by forensic lip readers, and supplied by actors, while the narration came from actual combatants via the oral histories. Even the sounds of artillery guns were realistic, having been recorded at a New Zealand Army military exercise. All the attention to detail, which Jackson discusses in a 30-minute feature following the film itself, was amazing.

That and, the harrowing experience of life in the trenches, on the battlefields, even in the hard work the soldiers were tasked with when they were not in the thick of the fighting, was eye-opening. Another vivid reminder of the insanity and horror of war.

Here is a trailer for the film:

Adam Gopnik described the technical feat of the making of the movie in a New Yorker article that is worth reading.