J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS ON THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD: Peter Jackson’s Masterpiece War Memorial.

Jackson’s film portrays the World War I soldier as you have never seen him: in color, in high definition and with sound.  They Shall Not Grow Old painstakingly cleans up the old jerky films of the Great War. . . . We journey forward to the trenches, where the rats and the corpses and the men all live as one.  They eat, and live and die on top of each other, all in high definition color.  Men slip into the mud and vanish forever. Brown iodine is swabbed on bleeding arms shot cleanly through by German bullets. A parade of the gassed march by with their arms on the shoulders of the man ahead.  These are real people, something the old black and white films of course contained.  But somehow, that medium dehumanized them.    They Shall Not Grow Old brings them alive, like we have a pass to visit them in Flanders and Passchendaele.  The film is a memorial to the World War I solider perhaps more profound than the Cenotaph.

You’ve got another chance to see it in theaters on December 27th. Highly recommended.