Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been taking his lumps of late. Mortal Engines, a new young adult fantasy movie he wrote and produced, has been savaged or ignored by critics and audiences alike. But redemption has come in the form of They Shall Not Grow Old, a World War I documentary Jackson directed that I want to stop writing this so I can immediately go see.
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The hook is this: Jackson and his team sifted through 100 hours of World War I-era footage from the Imperial War Museum, much of it used as propaganda back in the day. We’re talking 100-year-old footage here; it’s dirty, slow, shot on hand-cracked cameras, and without sound or color.
Then, with the help of partners like Studio D, Jackson and his team sped up the frame rate, stabilized the shots, colorized the images, and converted them to 3D. They touched up hundreds of hours of interviews with World War I veterans recorded in the ’60s and ’70s, and used their stories as narration. They made use of forensic lip readers, who often work with law enforcement to determine what people are saying in security cam footage and the like, to find out what the soldiers were talking about, and then hired region-appropriate actors to voice them.
The end result is that this footage, shot a damn century ago, looks up to the minute. It’s basically as close as a lot of people will ever likely get to time travel:
“The clarity was such that these soldiers on the film came alive,” Jackson told The New York Times. “Their humanity just jumped out at you. This footage has been around for 100 years and these men had been buried behind a fog of damage, a mask of grain and jerkiness and sped-up film. Once restored, it’s the human aspect that you gain the most.”
They Shall Not Grow Old is currently playing in a limited number of theaters in the U.S., and it will be hitting more on January 27. I hope I get a chance to see it.
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