“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.”)
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