They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson WWI Documentary)

[imsounoriginal]

Peter Jackson's WWI Doc Gets Title, London Film Festival Confirms World Premiere

'They Shall Not Grow Old' will help mark 100 years since the war came to an end.

Peter Jackson's WWI documentary, first announced earlier this year, has been given a name.

They Shall Not Grow Old, whose title comes from Laurence Binyon's 1914 poem "For the Fallen" and the Oscar-winning filmmaker's first turn as director since the final The Hobbit installment, has also been confirmed as getting its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, almost 100 years to the day that the war came to an end in 1918.

The film, which was co-commissioned by British WWI centenary arts program 14-18 NOW alongside Imperial War Museums, will be screened at the BFI Southbank on October 16, followed by a Q&A with Jackson hosted by film critic Mark Kermode, with both simultaneously screened in cinemas and special venues around the U.K.

Tapping into Jackson's own personal fascination with WWI, They Shall Not Grow Old has been created with original footage from Imperial War Museums' film archive and audio from the BBC archives, using voices of the veterans and original archive footage (which has been colorized and converted to 3-D) to bring the war to life in a way never seen before.

"I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film. By using our computing power to erase the technical limitations of 100-year cinema, we can see and hear the Great War as they experienced it," said Jackson.

"A hundred years after the First World War, we know much about the horrific impact of this conflict on its soldiers, especially the brutal scale of the casualties which decimated a generation, but Peter’s film offers new understanding of the human experience of life at the front," added London Film Festival artistic director Tricia Tuttle.

"Using original audio and moving image archive, he allows the soldiers to tell their own stories. The work his team has done on the materials, adding color and converting to 3-D, is painstaking and beautiful. It makes these people from 100 years ago seem so alive and gives an uncanny sense the footage was shot recently."

[levcore]

I applaud Jackson for doing this in 3D too. Should be a fascinating documentary

[Gacivory]

The one thing that annoys me, is that I don’t like when people colorize black and white photos.

[Creed]

Originally Posted by levcore

I applaud Jackson for doing this in 3D too. Should be a fascinating documentary

This is interesting. A WWI 3D documentary...

[Foggy]

Hopefully the simulcast is available locally, I’ll be checking it out.

[evilive]

I posted this on a another thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePxpbDmykD4

[Himmel]

http://youtu.be/D6Do1p1CWyc

[Steedeel]

Hoping this comes to Blu-ray in 3D. Something like this may be even more potent in three dimensions.

It’s on BBC, 11th November.

[evilive]

Looks so damn good!

[imsounoriginal]

I'm not much for war movies/documentaries, but Jackson's involvement has my interest.

[Archedamian]

I had not heard of this project but that video has piqued my interest.

[RalphoR]

Will that hippo with a machine gun be in this? Seriously, this looks really, really good. Probably very emotional, too.

[TheWildWhelk]

I'm seeing this with friends on Tuesday at the Curzon here in Oxford, should be quite a cinematic event. Been looking forward to this since it was announced earlier this year.

[imsounoriginal]

Reviews are coming in, here's THR's and Variety's.

Telling the collective story of Britain's First World War fighting men using their own words, They Shall Not Grow Old plots a loose chronological arc from the outbreak of hostilities to the battlefields of Belgium to the inking of the 1918 Armistice. Jackson deploys a simple but inspired structural device to draw the viewer into these historically remote anecdotes. The opening footage is a scratchy monochrome montage framed within a small central rectangle, which gradually widens to fill the entire screen before transforming into the film's fully colorized 3D midsection. In the final act, he reverses this process, as the post-war footage recede into memory once more. An elegant, poetic touch.

In terms of content, “They Shall Never Grow Old” is inevitably less revolutionary. The bones of the Great War have been exhaustively picked over, and Jackson’s interest lies not in uncovering new information, but in adding fresh dimensions of familiarity to what we already know. In addition to a thorough clean-up job, the film’s oral history has been as thoughtfully curated and threaded as the film footage it seamlessly accompanies, adding up to a fluent, first-hand human narrative unencumbered by dates, milestones and political process. This film’s business — the everyday, on-the-ground shifts in soldierly mood and morale across four very long years — is what tends to get left out of classroom textbooks.

[Rixx]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdY-1u-rk_M

[imsounoriginal]

Peter Jackson’s WWI Movie ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ Takes $730K In One Night, Eyes International Release

EXCLUSIVE: Peter Jackson’s World War I archive movie They Shall Not Grow Old took an impressive non-final £558,000 ($731,000) from 247 screens yesterday on its one night of play in the UK. Reaction has been so positive that the team behind it is now in discussions about international and U.S. release opportunities.

The movie’s strong take, which put it second at the local box office Tuesday, was good enough for a healthy £2,260 per-screen average. As first reported by the Telegraph, the team will now be adding encore screenings in the UK.

[Creed]

I hope so. It would be amazing to see this in 3D.

[RockyIII]

How can we watch this in the US?

[xbs2034]

Originally Posted by RockyIII

How can we watch this in the US?

It's just been acquired by Warner Bros for US release

https://deadline.com/2018/10/peter-j...ch-1202491670/

[Creed]

Great!