THE RESURRECTIONIST
At the beginning of director Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, we see British soldiers preparing for battle as we’ve always seen them: flickering figures moving herky-jerky through a silent world of gray and black in old, faded newsreel snippets.
But then, at the moment the soldiers arrive on the Western Front, the veil of the past suddenly—startlingly—drops away, as Jackson’s high-tech restoration and enhancement of vintage motion-picture footage shifts to 3-D color. The cratered landscape, the squalor of the trenches, and the vast blue skies appear in brilliant hues, and the rumble and roar of the artillery is terrifyingly loud. The troops morph from vague shadows into smooth-faced teenagers with gap-toothed smiles who move about naturally. When their lips move, they speak in authentic British regional dialects.
Jackson’s 99-minute film depicts World War I as never seen before on the screen. It might be the biggest advance in the art of the war documentary since The Battle of the Somme, the 1916 British film that gave audiences their first extended glimpse at combat. (Jackson used some restored footage from the film in his movie.)
The project might seem like a and trilogies. But Jackson—whose British grandfather, William Jackson, fought in the Somme offensive—has long been fascinated with World War I. Over the years he’s amassed a huge collection of weapons, uniforms, and other artifacts from the conflict, including vintage aircraft. (When Steven Spielberg made , his 2011 World War I epic, Jackson lent him three cargo containers of artifacts.)
