The Near-Perfect War Documentary Directed By Peter Jackson, According To Rotten Tomatoes

In the mid-2000s, director Peter Jackson was riding high on the success of his "Lord of the Rings" movies, having won multiple Academy Awards and made gazillions of dollars. For his follow-up film, Jackson was allowed to indulge in a high-profile vanity project: an effects-laden, $200 million remake of "King Kong," as the 1933 original was one of his favorite movies. The film itself was only okay. However, while he was making "King Kong," Jackson seemed to develop a new artistic interest. 

You see, Jackson knew of an excised "spider pit" sequence that had been cut from the 1933 "King Kong." Hence, he decided — just as a side project — to use his clout to recreate what it might have looked like using vintage film and effects. The results are fun enough (you can see them online), but Jackson had clearly been bitten by a bug. Following his spider pit experiment, Jackson became obsessed with recreation and restoration.

After another misguided stab at prestige ("The Lovely Bones") and his own much-criticized, George Lucas-like prequel trilogy (the "Hobbit" movies), Jackson finally gave himself permission to fully indulge in his restoration habits. The British Imperial War Museum, it turned out, had century-old silent film reels of English soldiers fighting on the front during World War I and had approached Jackson in 2015 about restoring the material in a modern context. Jackson went hog wild in response, colorizing the footage and using digital trickery to alter the early frame-rates to look smoother and more contemporary, all the while remixing it in 3D. The century-old footage suddenly looked like it was shot on modern digital cameras.

Jackson was also handed old BBC interviews with WWI-era soldiers, so he elected to play the audio over his restored footage. The resulting film, titled "They Shall Not Grow Old," was released in theaters in 2018 to much critical acclaim, as evidenced by its 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes. (You can check out /Film's own review of the movie here.)

The film stock that was used to shoot on-the-ground footage during World War I ran through the cameras at 13 frames per second. When it ran back, it either looked "choppy" to the eye or ran incredibly fast. Until the invention of synch sound in the late 1920s, there wasn't an industry-wide standard as to how quickly film should run through a camera or a projector, so many silent films seem to have the same "choppy" or "too quick" qualities. Because of this, Jackson used digital tools to "fill in" the missing frames in the footage used for "They Shall Not Grow Old," bringing it up to the post-sound standard of 24 frames per second.

Jackson also hired professional lip-readers to figure out what the WWI soldiers were saying as they were being filmed. He then recruited actors to perform their "dialogue," essentially adding human voices to where it had never been recorded. In addition, Jackson integrated new sound effects for the tanks on camera, as well as the shifting clothing, splashing mud, and other ambient noises.

The result is as realistic as one might hope. "They Shall Not Grow Old" feels like a museum piece; it's an homage to British soldiers that's brought to life with miraculous new restoration technologies. The audio recordings, meanwhile, let the soldiers have their actual voices, relating the harrowing experiences they had fighting in the trenches. They talked about their awful conditions, the bathroom situation, and the long breaks of doing nothing. "They Shall Not Grow Old" makes a century-old conflict feel immediate and human.

Most critics were fascinated by the experiment and pleased to see how Jackson's digital polish revealed relatable, unrefined young men. Some of them are crass and uncouth. Keep in mind that in the 1910s, when the footage was shot, no one had a second instinct as to how they should behave in front of a camera. They seem relaxed and flippant in a way that no modern human is anymore.

Many reviews (including the one I wrote for IGN back in the day) did sense that there were some tricky ethics at play with Jackson's restoration, however. Jackson wasn't necessarily "bringing footage to life," but adapting older footage to match what modern eyes are used to. In practice, it looks great, but philosophically, one might equate his actions with filmmakers colorizing black-and-white classics or creating digital avatars of dead actors.

Recall that the footage appears the way it does because of the tech available at the time, so perhaps it's our job as viewers to become accustomed to it, rather than the other way around. How often will we need to "update" old footage to make it consumable to modern eyes? And how long before the bulk of what we're seeing is not a reproduction but wholly new footage? After all, almost half of what we perceive in "They Shall Not Grow Old" was created artificially.

Some critics also noted that "They Shall Not Grow Old" lacks a lot of historical context. It's not so much about the meaning of the war, or the reasons people are fighting, but the soldiers themselves. It works as a film experiment and an homage to veterans, but it's not great history. 

The film's solitary "rotten" review posted on Rotten Tomatoes comes from Pamela Hutchinson, writing for Silent London. She felt that the digital restoration actually made the footage look less realistic, as if Jackson had been irresponsibly using real-life soldiers as an excuse to make new digital avatars, indulging only in his technical obsessions. The "smoothed out" movements of the 24fps, she wrote, made the soldiers float in an eerie way, while the colorization gave everyone the exact same artificial "peach" skin tone. The film was, she said, more like digital rotoscoping than proper restoration.

It's certainly a great film to spark debate.