They Shall Not Grow Old

Peter Jackson did not shoot a documentary; he pulled existing footage back through time. His team went through 100 hours of Imperial War Museum film and 600 hours of interviews with 200 veterans. The restoration was done at no charge, which left the museum's archive in better condition than it started. Frame rates were corrected and the image was colourised. Jackson's reasoning was straightforward: the soldiers did not experience the war in black and white. He wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world rather than present them as historical curiosities. The soundtrack is the contested part. Lip readers recovered dialogue from silent footage, which was then voiced by actors. Historians' objection is a fair one, since lip reading cannot recover regional accent or a century of shifted pronunciation. There is no narrator. The only voices are the veterans' own recordings. Jackson dedicated the film to his paternal grandfather, Sergeant William Jackson, who served in the war. Who it is for: anyone who wants the war as faces rather than statistics. Who it is not for: viewers unprepared for wounds and corpses. None of it is cut away from.