They Shall Not Grow Old

They Shall Not Grow Old arrives as clinching proof of just how far Peter Jackson has traveled in three decades.

Nothing feels too sentimentalized or sanitized, but nor is it sensationalized for extra shock value either. These are the true accounts of survivors, after all, mostly talking decades after the events and grateful to be alive.

Perhaps surprisingly, with a blockbuster merchant at the helm, little here is rousing or sentimental; the film's mordant intimacy of perspective endures as stoically as the speakers themselves.

Four years in the making, this feature-length documentary is an ingenious creation indeed.

There's a poignant eeriness to this modernization of WWI footage: we are looking into a past that feels touchably close and immediate like never before. But this is a novelty. A solemn one, but a novelty nonetheless.

They Shall Not Grow Old is stupendously humane, the polar opposite of propaganda.

Jackson has done something quite remarkable: using 21st-century technology to put the humanity back into old movie stock. The result is utterly breathtaking.

...unbearably poignant.

It's that rare cinematic beast: an instant classic.

Jackson would surely concede that the act of slowing and colouring in the archive film is a means to an end. It is a way of bringing the story of the men who fought 100 years ago back to life, and it works brilliantly.

In this remarkable documentary, Peter Jackson has applied his heavy bag of cinematic tricks to archive footage.

Jackson uses film and sound archive to their greatest imaginable effect, marrying incredible moving pictures with more than 150 personal testimonies recorded decades after the carnage, played one after another for 100 enthralling minutes.