They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018) (Patreon)

Despite all the hype, Jackson's colorization of the footage from the Great War is really the least impressive thing about this very moving documentary. Yes, it is jarring to see these men, whose like we have witnessed exclusively in degraded black and white, with olive drab uniforms and the approximation of a pink glow of life. But even with current digital technology, the colors warp and smear and seem to hover over the men's forms like chromatic ghosts. We never forget we are watching something additive, not organic.

But this in no way diminishes the overall achievement of They Shall Not Grow Old. That's because Jackson and Fran Walsh have assembled an unusually brilliant collage of pre- and mid-war footage together with the first-person recollections of dozens of British vets, their voices weaving in and out of each other like a nation's chorus. They explain the initial excitement in the run-up to the war, the camaraderie of training, and then the unexpected horror of modern trench warfare on the French and Belgian fronts. Many were just children, and as they tell it, a common sense of duty and basic masculine imperative drove them on. Those who came back were forever changed, and to an extent, polite Britain didn't know what to do with them.

These tales are expertly wedded to footage that both illustrates their claims and makes them run deeper, making them more complicated. We see the bodies strewn about the trenches, littering No Man's Land, and we hear several men express genuine admiration for the Germans they were fighting, recognizing that, by and large, they were just lads like themselves. We see dour men trudging through wet sticky mud, their boots filling with icy cold, knowing some will lose feet and legs to gangrene. We witness the Blitzkrieg from up close, and hear the men assess their own mortality. The survivors speak for all those who didn't make it, which is most of those onscreen. And that is the most poignant element of all. The film connects image and sound by linking the living and the dead.

An old professor of mine, Anton Kaes, wrote a book entitled, Shell Shock, about World War One, cinema, and mechanized death. In it, he argued that the Great War was essentially the start of modernity, since the Blitzkrieg dislodged the conventional human sensorium. He went on to argue, somewhat facetiously, that World War Two was simply a repetition of World War One, from a technological standpoint. But They Shall Not Grow Old has it differently. The men who fought the war all seem to agree about its fundamental pointlessness. So World War One could be seen as a dress rehearsal for the next war, when the British, and others, would actually step up and save the world.

This is, of course, implicit. Less Ken Burns or A&E and more of a piece with Terence Davies or Humphrey Jennings, They Shall Not Grow Old is humanist cinema par excellence.