{"id":7798,"date":"2019-02-21T07:01:11","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T12:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7798"},"modified":"2019-04-17T07:22:24","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T11:22:24","slug":"they-shall-not-grow-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7798","title":{"rendered":"They Shall Not Grow Old"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

New Zealand director Peter Jackson has accomplished\nsomething of a miracle. At the behest of Britain\u2019s Imperial War Museum, he and\nhis team have created a documentary about World War I using archival\nfootage\u2014scratched, faded, juddery\u2014and restored it nearly to today\u2019s standards (trailer<\/a>). The process\nachieves more than improving watchability, it brings these soldiers to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he received the assignment, Jackson didn\u2019t know what\nthe film would be, his brief was simply to \u201cdo something creative\u201d with the\nfilm archive in time for the 100th anniversary of the armistice last November\n11. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He and his team melded the restored film with the voices of\nmen who had served, interviewed by the BBC decades later. They went to war as\nordinary soldiers, they were young (ages 15, 16, and 17, many of them), and their\nreminiscences of the war were quite different than what their officers\u2019 would\nhave been. This isn\u2019t a movie with battle maps and arrows, strategy and\ntactics. It\u2019s not about the unique or memorable incident. It\u2019s everyday\nsurvival. Mud and lice and rats and cigarettes. I cried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stick around for the post-movie feature about how the film\nwas restored. The before-and-after examples of changing the timing, fixing\nover- and under-exposures, how sound was added, and the colorization are fascinating.\nTheir devotion to detail pays off. Speaking of paying off, the film has broken\nbox office records for a documentary, and Jackson himself took no fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t a movie about heroes. It\u2019s about everyday lads\ndoing the best they can in the worst circumstances. In the most important\nsense, they\u2019re all heroes.Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>\ncritics rating: 99%; audiences 92%.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Zealand director Peter Jackson has accomplished something of a miracle. At the behest of Britain\u2019s Imperial War Museum, he and his team have created a documentary about World War I using archival footage\u2014scratched, faded, juddery\u2014and restored it nearly to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"They Shall Not Grow Old - Don't miss this compelling recreation of WWI archival footage, which tells the story not of great battles, but the daily lives of soldiers.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[58,266,118,57,60,186,104],"tags":[1520,416,1519],"class_list":["post-7798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-documentaries","category-history","category-memoir","category-movies","category-storytelling","category-technology","category-the-morgue","tag-peter-jackson","tag-real-life","tag-wwi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old-2.jpg?fit=700%2C259&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-21M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7802,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798\/revisions\/7802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}