Butler's Cinema Scene

“THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD” My rating: B+

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Time travel may be just a theory, but something like it is at work at theaters where Peter Jackson’s “They Shall Not Grow Old”  is playing.

Jackson, the director of the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” franchises, has taken hundreds of  hours of World War I movie footage owned by Britain’s National War Museum and from it fashioned a feature film that practically jumps off the screen and into our laps (and that’s even if you pass on the 3-D version).

The story he tells is that of common English men — boys, really — who signed up to go to defend their country and found themselves in the ghastly trench war of the Western Front in France.  The film relies on snippets of audio interviews the BBC conducted with veterans of the Great War back in the ’60s and ’70s;  now long gone, these men reveal their experiences and innermost feelings about what they went through.

But what makes “They Shall Not Grow Old” absolutely mind-churning is the way Jackson and hundreds of technicians restored the old footage, cleaning up the dust motes and cracked emulsion, colorizing the images and providing an immersive stereo soundtrack.

The film’s first 30 minutes are basically the story of recruitment and training in  black-and-white; then, with the troops’ arrival in France, the screen blossoms with color as we are, in effect, dropped into the meat grinder.

The transition from black-and-white to Technicolor is as poetically jarring as it was in “The Wizard of Oz.”

There’s stuff here that even hard-core World War I junkies haven’t seen. Like what a trench latrine looked like (a thick pole stretched across a pool of muck; we see four bare bottoms simultaneously making use of the facilities). Like a bad case of trenchfoot, a ghastly condition born of wearing wet boots and socks for days on end (in effect, it’s gangrene).

There are piles of dead rats, the result of a housecleaning in one trench. There are bodies hanging on the barbed wire; some stayed so long their living neighbors could watch the slow process of decomposition over weeks. (One old gent describes war as “a fantastic exhibition of anatomy.”)

We undergo a hair-raising artillery bombardment, and watch mesmerized as a cloud of deadly yellow gas flows across no-man’s land toward the British lines.

Interestingly enough, some of the veterans whose voices we hear say that for all the horrors they wouldn’t have missed the experience.  One gentleman describes it all as “like camping out…with the slight spice of danger to make it interesting.”

We learn that there were different degrees of enemy.  The Bavarians in the German army were pretty much like the British Tommies — farmers and shopkeepers who mostly wanted to stay alive.  The Prussians, on the other hand, were hated for their brutality and ideological madness by the enlisted men of both camps.

Many of these men suffered from what we now call PTSD.  Back then it didn’t have a name; men were expected to simply tough it out.

“It began to wear on one, you know,” recalls one veteran in a masterpiece of stiff-upper-lip  understatement.

But what haunts after watching this film are the faces.  The novelty of having a motion picture camera in the vicinity meant that every man in sight turned to this object of curiosity. Some clowned (one fellow is so busy looking at the cameraman that he marches right into a splintered fence post and falls on his face). Others express befuddlement and fear; many wouldn’t outlive the day their image was captured on film.

There have been countless war documentaries, but few unfold with the visual, aural and spiritual poetry of “They Shall Not Grow Old.” It’s a transcendent experience.

| Robert W. Butler