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Critics Consensus: An impressive technical achievement with a walloping emotional impact, They Shall Not Grow Old pays brilliant cinematic tribute to the sacrifice of a generation.
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Critic Consensus: An impressive technical achievement with a walloping emotional impact, They Shall Not Grow Old pays brilliant cinematic tribute to the sacrifice of a generation.
All Critics (36) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (35) | Rotten (1)
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.
In the unnervingly chirpy cadences of the era, we are told of rats, filth, and mutilation in the trenches, but also the emotional strain and dehumanisation that took place as pimply young men were isolated in a world that stank of death.
Colourising and enhancing the footage and using lip-readers to decipher soldiers' words, which were dubbed by actors, was done to jaw-dropping effect.
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.
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