They Shall Not Grow Old movie review (2018)
“They Shall Not Grow Old” begins with black and white footage of soldiers preparing to leave for battle, a haunting 4:3 square of arrested motion, small in the center of the frame, as men march to what was likely most of their deaths. "I gave every part of my youth to do a job," says the first phantom voice. The film is filled with voices, credited at the end, that speak over faces whose identity we'll never learn. The anonymity is part of the point. The governments responsible for orchestrating the conflict viewed them as chess pieces. "It was like a great big game," says another voice a moment later. Indeed, that was how Kaiser Wilhelm, his cousin Tsar Nicholas II, French president Raymond Poincaré, British prime minister David Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson saw it, throwing hordes of young men into the meat grinders on the German front lines and making millions, in Wilson's case, playing the war powers against each other and staying out of the conflict until it made financial sense.
It can be easy to lose track of mammoth scope of World War I, which is why it makes sense that a New Zealander would want to make a film about the men who fought it. New Zealand's population was just over a million people and about ten percent of that number (nurses and fighting men of myriad ethnic extractions) went to fight in the war. Roughly 17,000 men from that colossal fighting force were killed and another 41,000 wounded. The deaths tend to be harder to ignore in a smaller place and it's quite obvious that the scars of the conflict made their way down to Jackson and Walsh.
The impetus for the project was both the anniversary of the armistice that ended the war and advancements made in digital manipulation of antique footage. Jackson and Walsh have done something special bringing all this old footage to new life, complete with newly looped voice recordings to fill in the action, booming sound effects to match cannon fire, and adding color. Once again, he's translated something that's growing ancient into a series of images and ideas a modern audience will be able to grasp. And if we can make sense of the image, we can hopefully make sense of the horror it portends.
