Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

They Shall Not Grow Old, the colourised black and white film of the 1st World War, by Peter Jackson brings the Great War alive, by humanising it with colour; but is it more authentic? Is it more natural, but less real? The film was created by selecting material from more than 100 hours of black and white film footage from the BBC and Imperial War Museums (IWM) archives. Through technological skill and artistry, the film has been slowed down (from 13 to 24 frames per second), sharpened up, colourised, given sound effects and made 3D. Lip readers viewed the footage and actors dubbed dialogue onto the film, matching the accents of the regiment shown on screen – and the film is entirely narrated through snippets of oral testimony by veterans. But in the world of documentary this is neither fish, flesh nor fowl. It is another kind of fiction. But art is the lie which realizes truth. . The past is a foreign country, and we are like visiting aliens, whose space ship uncovers through advanced technology, what was dumb, erased and buried, the truly forgotten young men, who rushed off too young to enlist, but finding ways through with patriotic fervour endured the gruelling slaughter of fighting in the trenches,. And found the collective camaraderie of marching troops who lived in filth, blood and fear, singing away their losses when they had a welcome break from the front line. So this is not history, it’s not documentary, although they both use reconstruction and re-enactment. We get no intertitles of locations and dates, and we are confined to one fighting troop of western white troops. Jackson also makes use of the propaganda sketches of War Illustrated to show soldiers going over the top in the absence of film footage. Some narrative commentary saying what the sources are on screen would have been more like history. This film is like dipping a Madeleine cake into the past and restoring it, though each time it comes back different. The opening sections in Blighty in a square frame in misty black and white, with the constant whirr of a projector, as if showing home movies. Then he dramatically drops us across the Channel and into the quagmires of France and Belgium, with the reality of mechanised trench warfare revealed in widescreen and living colour. To show the effect, some scenes are half in colour, half in black and white. There are many memorable images; slates dislodged from a rooftop by a mighty Howitzer blast; men queuing for beer ‘’one pint and 9 piddles’’; a mound of dead rats killed by the men; the bloodied corpses of horses or horses panicking as they’re towing the big guns to the front; the seas of dead soldiers ripped asunder by bullets or shell splinters; rounding up of captive young Germans who befriend the young British soldiers, sharing cigarettes or drinks with them, or help transport the wounded to a place of safety. The real horror show begins when they find back in England they are unwanted, unemployed, unable to share the depths of terror of the war, unable to talk. When the war ended on 11th November 1918, there followed an Armistice without celebration among the ranks. These scarred Britishers meet mass indifference. What we get is an imagined reality, not reality itself A reality that never existed. We are misled into thinking individual faces of soldiers in a group are the corpses we see. Is the sound also true to subject? One reviewer suggests that trench scenes have been “remixed” to include “a Dolbyfied rumble of shells”. This is not scholarly history, but history made public. This was shown on Armistice Day on BBCiPlayer for a few days, which is when I saw it. It will later be released in the cinema. See it, do.