Wednesday, February 6, 2019

They Shall Not Grow Old (2019)

Rotten Tomatoes
They Shall Not Grow Old (2019): Documentary footage from WWI, brilliantly restored and colorized by Peter Jackson, with added sound and voices. No historians or generals, only soldiers on the front lines. No one not there can know what it was like but this is next best thing. A-

2 comments:

Jason Lemons said...

Tremendous, powerful film. Loved its focus on the perspective of the average soldier. I also really enjoyed the mini-documentary after the film in which Peter Jackson described the process of restoring old footage for the film and bringing everything back to life.

Mark Steger said...

What I learned from the extra feature after the movie is that old movies often appear jerky because they are being projected at a different speed than what the film was originally shot at. And there's really no way to automatically fix this, as some of those old films were shot using cameras that were hand-cranked, meaning the speed the film went through the camera varied as the cameraman's arm speed varied. So, Peter Jackson's team had to experiment shot by shot to adjust the speed until the movie looked right. The result is a powerfully realistic restoration.