Screening at the Panida, They Shall Not Grow Old is a masterpiece of war and memory

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

If there are two things human beings are good at, it’s killing each other and forgetting. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t remind and warn each other, “lest we forget” and “never forget.” “Memory” wouldn’t be the root of Memorial Day. We wouldn’t have books like War and Remembrance and we wouldn’t have cliches like “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”

The documentary They Shall Never Grow Old puts both war and remembrance in powerful focus, presenting a portrait of the First World War in colorized, speed-corrected and sound-mixed detail that more than any other film brings its subjects to some approximation of life.  

Released in 2018 by director Peter Jackson to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the film is a technical as well as human masterpiece. 

The Great War is a relic, too often framed as a montage of gray-scale masses of indistinguishable pot-helmeted men scuttling in almost comical herky-jerky cadence over silent moonscapes of blurry shell holes. The enormous mortar blasts and artillery flashes are mute flashes of white-on-black and the tanks rumble noiselessly in their absurd bulk.

They Shall Not Grow Old features remastered footage from WWI. Screenshot courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Atop these muzzy images viewers hear oration by stentorian voices proclaiming dates and obscure place names, and no WWI documentary is complete without some proclamation that while the conflict represented the first “modern” war it was also the last one to feature 19th-century equipment, tactics and attitudes. Also: rats.

After a few hundred of these types of films — all devoted, of course, to the important task of “remembrance” — it all starts to blur together in something akin to the muddiness of the battlefields themselves. We’re numbed by the repetition as much as the sense of distance, both in time and feeling, between that world and our own. The human beings involved fade in the haze of enormity, made more inscrutable through the scratchy-sketchy recording technology available at the time.  

The achievement at the center of They Shall Not Grow Old, and why it’s so acclaimed, is that by slowing down the speed of the footage — much of it hitherto obscure or unseen — and giving color to its scenes, we see with sudden, jarring clarity what we thought were familiar tableaux rendered in their human scale without losing scope. The process magnifies both.

Rather than the standard “expert narration,” Jackson overlays the voices of World War I veterans, recorded and archived long before they disappeared — waiting to have their say. 

In this vision of the war, we see the careful-clumsy movement of men picking their way over shattered tree trunks, slipping as we would do in ungraceful movements. In their glances at the camera (which would have been a novelty then), we’re given the time to see the complexity of their emotions — looking so much like our own. We hear the earth-shattering crack of explosions and see the vicious colors of flame, smoke and gas, as well as the rattle of gear and shuffle of marching feet, filled too with mumbled conversation and laughter.

Critic Scout Tafoya wrote in his Dec. 14, 2018 four-star review on rogerebert.com, we’re reminded that the war didn’t occur in an eternal smear of grayness. Sometimes — many times — the grass and trees were green, and there wasn’t a cloud in the summer skies of western Europe. “They died in broad daylight,” Tafoya wrote. 

If there’s a better way to remember these people, it’s hard to think of how to do it better.