Review of They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) by Tvjerry — 07 Feb 2019

The British War Museum approached Peter Jackson with 100 hours of film from World War I and 600 hours of audio interviews by soldiers. He created this astounding documentary that details the experiences of these men, mostly on the front lines in Belgium.

The stories are engaging, gripping and touching. What makes this effort so astounding is the technology that's used to bring the grainy, jerky footage to life with fluid motion, added camera movement and colorization.

Although the stories get a bit repetitive and they're sometimes hard to understand (because of accents or too much background noise), it's an absolutely captivating illumination of the challenges and humanity of war.

To make it even more remarkable, Jackson follows up the doc with a fascinating explanation of how all the tech tricks work. This is one of the great technological achievement, that also tells a powerful story.