“They Shall Not Grow Old” is tricked out with ingeniously integrated sound editing and seamlessly retimed from 13 frames a second to 24 and took an impressive non-final $731,000 from 247 screens on its one night of play in the UK.
The Guardian called it “electrifying,” giving it five stars, while The Independent said it was “astonishing.”
The Guardian called it “electrifying,” giving it five stars, while The Independent said it was “astonishing.”
Requests have reportedly been streaming in from international press asking how they can see the film. The BBC will broadcast the film in the UK on Armistice Day, November 11.
Originally intended to be a 30-minute piece, the power of the material and the scope of the subject meant it became a 99-minute feature. The film’s success is another example of the huge appetite for strong docus right now, both on the small and big screens.
https://deadline.com/2018/10/peter-jackson-wwi-movie-they-shall-not-grow-old-1202484472/
This is a film to fill you with an intensified version of all the old feelings: mostly rage at the incompetence and cruelty of a governing class that put these soldiers through hell in their mechanization and normalization of war.
The details are harrowing, as is the political incorrectness of what the soldiers recall: some express their candid enjoyment of the war, others their utter desensitization to what they experienced. When the end came, many felt only disappointment and anticlimax: “It was like being made redundant.” And in the war itself, there is nauseous acceptance of horror. You could die simply by stumbling off the duckboards and sinking into the mud. There were the fat rats (“and you knew how they got fat”), the trench foot, the lice. This film also shows you something no Hollywood production ever would: the latrines – a trench over which men would have to squat, sitting precariously on a pole, some inevitably falling in.
It is possible that, if and when the technology used in it becomes commonplace, They Shall Not Grow Old may not be considered to have contributed much to what we already understand about the first world war. Maybe. Trench warfare and its horrors have arguably become a subject for reflex piety, while soldiers’ experiences in the second world war, or other wars, are somehow not considered poignant in the same way. But as an act of popular history, They Shall Not Grow Old is outstanding.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/16/they-shall-not-grow-old-review-first-world-war-peter-jackson
https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/they-shall-not-grow-old-review-peter-jackson-1202981266/
If you are wondering what in the hell I'm talking about, this is a followup to https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2018/10/this-looks-amazing-ww1-films-in-color.html
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