Review – They Shall Not Grow Old

The Imperial War Museum and the BBC both gave Peter Jackson unlimited access to their archives of materials about World War One, and he achieved two results. He found some incredible film records of the war, particularly life in the trenches. But then he “modernizes” it all, cropping it to a new aspect ratio, overdubbing it with what people appear to be saying, and colorizing it. I admit I’ve been an opponent of colorization since it first became an issue back in the 1980s, but it’s a particularly terrible job here. For example, all the corpses have been painted pale blue. The process takes one of history’s most epic tragedies and turns it into a bad comic book. The source footage would have made an amazing movie, but the project is undone by the director’s tinkering. Mildly amusing