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A before and after image showing the original film on the right and the restored image on the left in a still from Peter Jackson's WWI documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.Imperial War Museum / Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

They Shall Not Grow Old

Directed by Peter Jackson

Classification: 14A; 99 minutes

Rating:

4 out of 4 stars

All artists face the weight of how to memorialize their relatives. If you’re Peter Jackson, you’ll chose to salvage over 100 hours of archival footage accessed from the Imperial War Museum.

They Shall Not Grow Old is a high-wire feat of restoration, as Jackson’s team of over 400 rotoscope artists colourized and transferred footage of British army soldiers in wartime into visually stunning 3D. The film is a tribute to his late grandfather who served as a British officer in the First World War from 1910 to 1918.

Best known for his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit franchises, Jackson makes his first documentary here. Ever the technical wizard (with all due respect to Gandalf), he plays a magic trick, transforming damaged black-and-white archival footage into a living painting where the deep space images of soldiers trudging through trenches and mugging for the camera seem realer than real. Here, a rippling strips of bullets on the side of a tank engine flow like a river. The explosion are amazing because they feel true. They Shall Not Grow Old is the best and most warranted use of 3-D in the current cinema.

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Peter Jackson's documentary transforms damaged black-and-white archival First World War footage into a living painting.Imperial War Museum / Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

A subdued educational war documentary may seem like a strange career move for the filmmaker whose last film, in 2014, was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, yet Jackson’s latest work falls right in line with his filmography. If he has a signature shot within his oeuvre, it’s of a group of soldiers traversing a desolate landscape, heading out towards unknown harm. They crack a joke, they stop by a stream to drink from a river – this film has the same glorious deep space pastoral compositions as found in Lord in the Rings and a similar obsessive focus on male friendships formed during battle.

From Heavenly Creatures onward, Jackson has always been fixated on the kinds of relationships that are formed when people (and the interspecies of Middle Earth) are long pushed past their breaking point. Here, the trauma and the chaotic rush of intense emotion during wartime are treated with absolute respect for their banality. There are no protagonists or talking heads as he pairs his transformed archival footage with a flood of voice-over narration from over 100 former officers who all served in the First World War from all over the British Empire.

As you see groups of young men signing up to enlist and marching through the streets of England, they talk about lying about their age and how bad the food is in the mess hall. (“The beer was very thin indeed,” one complains.) An unknown soldier describes the act of running a lit candle over the seams of their uniform to stop a lice infestation and “hearing the eggs go pop, pop, pop.” All these visceral details have a novelistic quality – Jackson’s documentary could also be a very good podcast. You begin to understand how much of war is about killing time and staving off loneliness while you face the anticipation of what will happen when you actually fight.

No detail is too mundane for Jackson’s documentary – the soldiers weigh the pros and cons of which flavour of jam is best on toast, the act of cleaning their rifle, the pustules in their trench foot, the venereal diseases that form after visiting their first brothel, how the sound of gunfire gets louder and louder as they trudge through the French countryside, stopping to dig for carrots and turnips in the snow. “I liked being told what to do because there was a reason for doing it,” confesses an unknown soldier. This is a coming of age film. Slowly, you begin to understand how little life experience every man had before they went away to face unspeakable death and violence.

There is a museum piece quality to They Shall Grow Old that occasionally gives way to educational boringness. While the archival footage is stunning, Jackson must also rely on rudimentary photographs or cartoons to convey a point and the film’s climatic battle is captured in illustration due to a lack of source material. Some less compelling anecdotes could use better curation and the lack of any characters or protagonists in the film can be disorienting. Yet one feels this must be intentional. Never giving way to sensationalism or sentimentality, Jackson is only interested in the universal banality of war and how a million men who served can all have the same coming of age experience.

“They say your past comes up when you’re going to die, but I hadn’t got much past when I was 19, so all I thought was: ‘Am I going to live?’” remarks another soldier as we get closer and closer to the end. There is of course an inevitability to all war documentaries. Jackson’s film travels past the First World War’s Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1918, to detail the painful transition of coming home to an unknown future and a group of friends and family members who will never understand what you’ve experienced.

Using nothing but the voices and the images from the past, They Shall Not Grow Old is a powerful tribute to every veteran and one of the most empathetic portraits of war ever created. His grandfather would be proud.

They Shall Not Grow Old screens in select Canadian cities Dec. 17 and Dec. 27; it also plays the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Jan. 17

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