They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) on Netflix
R20181h 39mDocumentaryHistoryWar
Archive footage of the First World War, most of it never shown before, is restored and colorized. The voices of the British soldiers who fought describe life on the western front.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb8.2/1041,190 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
Trailer
Plot summary
About a hundred hours of First World War footage, most of it never shown before and all of it more than a century old, forms the material. It was restored, and much of it colorized, with sound effects and voice work added to silent scenes. Instead of a narrator, the audience hears the voices of British soldiers, taken from interviews with some two hundred veterans. The makers left out names, dates and locations so that the men describe their own war: their feelings about the conflict, meals, friendships, the trenches, and what they hoped for afterward. The aim was to give an immersive sense of a soldier's experience rather than to recount events.
Cast
- Thomas Adlamas Self - Bedfordshire Regiment (voice)
- William Argentas Self - Royal Naval Air Service (voice)
- John Ashbyas Self - The Duke of Cambridge's Own (Middlesex Regiment) (voice)
- Attwoodas Self - British Army (voice)
- Walter Austas Self - East Yorkshire Regiment (voice)
- Donald Bainas Self - Seaford Highlanders (voice)
- Thomas Bakeras Self - Chatham Battalion, Royal Naval Division (voice)
- George Bantonas Self - 50th Division Headquarters (voice)
- Walter Becklakeas Self - Northamptonshire Yeomanry (voice)
- Arthur Beetonas Self - Royal Navy Air Service (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To assemble the film Peter Jackson's team went through 100 hours of Imperial War Museum footage and 600 hours of BBC and IWM interviews with 200 First World War veterans. Only 120 of those voices ended up in the finished film.
- Peter Jackson took no payment for the film, and his crew restored all 100 hours of footage the Imperial War Museum sent them without charge, simply to leave the museum's archive in better shape than they found it.
- Jackson cut out every name, date and place so the film would not be about one battle or one day. As he put it, he wanted "120 men telling a single story", answering the question of what it was like to be a British soldier on the western front.
- Jackson defended colourising the archive by pointing out the men saw the war in color, and saying he wanted to reach through the fog of time rather than leave them looking like Charlie Chaplin figures in vintage film.
- The closing song, the wartime favorite "Mademoiselle from Armentieres", was chosen so late there was barely time to record it. Jackson was in New Zealand and refused to have locals fake British accents, so British men working at the British High Commission there were recruited to sing it.
- A missed deadline cost the film any chance of an Oscar: it was not filed by 1 October 2018, making it ineligible for Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Academy Awards, and as a 2018 release it was barred from the following year's award too.
- Not everyone welcomed the restoration. Archivists and film historians objected that it erased the original cameramen and implied the Imperial War Museum's already restored footage was in disrepair, while historians questioned the lip-read dialogue, which cannot recover century-old accents or pronunciation.
