"They Don't Grow Old Anymore": If there was only one war movie left for mankind, this is it

Julian 2022-04-23 07:03:53


They are no longer old, but we are leggy:
No more lamenting the passing of time,
I will never hate getting old again.
Whenever the sun goes down and the sun rises, we will think of them:
They can never return to their festive comrades,
They can never go back to the familiar table at home,
They are no longer toiled as we are,
They slept on the other side,
In between are the waves of the English coast.
- "To the Fallen Soldiers" (1914)


War is the eternal pain of mankind .

In the history of film, war-themed movies are easy to make classics.

In the cruel environment near the gate of death, the joys and sorrows of human beings are infinitely magnified .

Going out, the shocking war scenes bring audio-visual shock waves; going inward, the delicate emotions and human nature in the desperate situation of hell are pulling the heartstrings.

The former we have "Apocalypse Now", "Black Hawk Down", "The Thin Red Line", the latter we have "Life is Beautiful", "Schindler's List", "Full Metal Jacket" and so on.

War movies are mirrors of history. These excellent war films don't embellish the battlefield, whitewash death, dwarf the enemy, and ignore common sense. All good war movies are anti-war movies.

But even as good as they are, these war movies still have one fate: drama .

The dramatic core of drama films leads to a more or less distance between them and the "real war". If you want a more realistic war image, the only solution is to make a documentary .

In today's peaceful age without large-scale wars, "recording wars in real time" is a fantasy.

Fortunately, with the gradual development of film technology to this day, it has become possible to use the existing multi-type materials in the world to "remake" a war documentary film.

Last year, on the 100th anniversary of the victory of the First World War, a documentary film about the "World War I" was officially released. For the first time in human history, the souls sacrificed in World War I will be "resurrected" on the big screen. visual wonder .

After a year, it finally met the audience in mainland China.

No matter in terms of film quality or historical significance, this film is one of the most worth watching movies in mainland China this year .

For moviegoers in particular, missing out on its big-screen version will make your moviegoing life incomplete.

For the average audience, it can be the flavoring after you've watched a fast-paced entertainment movie, provided you're patient enough with plenty of narrated historical imagery.

The title of the film is taken from the sentence in the long emotional poem at the beginning of the article - " They shall not grow old" (2018)

01 The original intention of Peter Jackson

The director of "They Don't Grow Old" is Peter Jackson (Peter Jackson, PJ), who is good at shooting grand scenes, and his most famous work is the famous "Lord of the Rings" trilogy .

And his last film dates back to 2014, which is also a magical business blockbuster "The Hobbit 3".

After "Huo 3", the Hollywood business director has not released a new work for 5 years, the reason is that he devoted all his time to the creation of "They Don't Grow Old".

On the one hand, it reflects the difficulty of this project.

On the other hand, director PJ was able to choose to return to the original intention of the filmmaker after making such a big commercial achievement in Hollywood, and to create an "original" documentary film with more historical significance than entertainment significance. His courage is worthy of our respect.

The lead party of the project "They Don't Grow Old" is actually the British Imperial War Museum . In order to better preserve the multi-media historical materials of "World War I" in the collection, they came up with the idea of ​​making a documentary film, and the finished film itself became the part of its future holdings of historical materials.

The participants in this project also include the most famous BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) in the UK. As we all know, the BBC, which has been devoted to the output of humanistic content, also holds a lot of precious historical materials.

From the relevant interviews with the director, we learned that the creative team led by PJ encountered very difficult challenges in the first stage of taking over the project.

They were presented with about 250 hours of black-and-white film footage and over 600 hours of audio and video interviews with veterans, and it took them a full year just to read and listen to the material.

Regardless of the material sent by the museum and the BBC, their quality can be described as uneven .

The film was contaminated and even scratched due to its age, the audio was not connected in various ways, and many soundtrack fragments were lost. And PJ's creative goals are:

The audio of the interview is restored as the narration and "lines" of the whole film, and the restored black-and-white or color historical images or propaganda posters are used as images, and these first-hand sound and picture materials are used to restore the real thoughts and war experiences of British soldiers in World War I.

Why did director Peter Jackson resolutely do such a thankless thing?

The first reason, as many people know, is selfishness.

His grandfather participated in the whole war, and the director said that he was proud of his grandfather since he was a child. "They Don't Grow Old" is a gift from PJ to his grandfather.

What many people don't understand is that Peter Jackson actually made documentaries at the beginning of his debut.

It was 1995, before he made his foray into Hollywood and made a name for himself, he made "Forgotten Silver" about the history of New Zealand cinema .

There is also a small episode here, because the shooting method is too realistic, this film was banned in New Zealand, and the director also had a bad fate. After more than 20 years, Peter Jackson's filming of this documentary war is actually a return to his original intention of film creation . What we see is the persistence of an excellent filmmaker.

02 High-tech restoration project

From the conclusion, all the materials used in the film "He" are taken from real historical images, most of which are made public for the first time . PJ and his team transformed the black and white silent film into a color 3D film through the most advanced computer special effects technology!

Seeing this sentence, we feel great. But the technical difficulties faced by the film are actually far beyond our imagination.

Let's talk about audio repair first.

In addition to fixing the sound of the interviews of the soldiers participating in the war, the bigger challenge is how to make the sound correspond to the black and white picture .

To this end, the creators have to write a story line, arrange these recordings in chronological order, and imagine the corresponding picture material by sound.

Because the video materials at that time were all silent, the main creator also needed to carry out a huge dubbing project .

For the video clips with dialogue scenes, Jackson found a lip-reader and showed them the clips in the movie where the soldiers were talking.

As for the ambient sound of guns, it corresponds to the countdown.

In order to restore the sound of guns and cannons on the battlefield, the crew specially found weapons and equipment from the First World War , which were operated and sampled by sound engineers, and also collected various sounds such as shell explosions, footsteps in the mud, the click of gun bolts, and the sound of horse hooves. , to serve the screen.

Audio repair is not the most difficult, how to repair broken black and white images and "paint" color, how to make different low frame number pictures evenly adjusted to modern 24 frames, how to make images of different aspect ratios converge in a movie , Each of these problems is a high-tech project. Due to the age of black and white film, there are many noises and scratches. The main creative team needs to clean up and denoise them one by one.

In order to ensure that the color reproduction of the old film is true, clear and natural, PJ personally visited the scene of World War I and took more than 1,000 photos to color the scene for reference.

In order to restore all the soldiers' uniforms, badges, small objects and other details to their true colors as much as possible, the team found a large number of real uniforms left over from World War I for comparison, and prepared nearly 4,000 colors!

Adjusting the frame and adjusting the playback speed is even more difficult. It is necessary to adjust the frame by frame through the frame insertion method , which is much more difficult than Ang Lee's use of 120 frames to shoot "Gemini Man". This is the kind of "you have money". Nothing can be done.”

The problem of unification of the screen ratio is even more difficult. We all know that the aspect ratio of the movie was 4:3 for a long time at the beginning of its birth, and in order to make such an image fit with the modern 1.9 screen, the upper and lower original images must be cropped.

One sacrifice is inevitable, that is: black and white images can be repaired, colored, 3D, and even frame inserted , but they must not be displayed on today's big screen without cropping the picture . This makes the lack of picture information inevitable, which is very regrettable. We look forward to a better solution to this problem in the future. Although it can't solve the problem of the amount of information, the unique visual effects can make up for the look and feel. The most amazing thing is the 3D presentation of the black and white images at the beginning and end . Under the 3D effect, the audience will perceive the great depth of field of the black and white picture, as if passing through a time tunnel to spy on the battlefield of the past , giving birth to an unprecedented viewing experience.

To a certain extent, this is the most appropriate movie using 3D technology in domestic cinema chains that I have ever seen . It is for this reason of 3D rendering that the best version of "They Don't Grow Old" must be seen in a movie theater , not your home electronic device.

03 The daily history of the war of ordinary soldiers

After talking about so many technical issues, I ended up talking about the story part of the movie. The biggest highlight of "They Don't Grow Old" from the previous war films at the text level is that: on the surface, it is a panoramic view of the war process on the Western Front battlefield of World War I, but the actual focus is from the perspective of ordinary soldiers, 100% true Recreate the daily life of ordinary soldiers in war.

This kind of daily life comes entirely from individual private observation and experience, which is different from the grand and vague mainstream official narrative of traditional war films. The film shows the most ordinary life of ordinary soldiers, which is even full of fun, contrary to our stereotypes about war. For example, tug-of-war, play and sing, play childish multiplayer games in free time, etc.

The scenes of joy in the bitterness include: urinating in military boots to lubricate the feet when marching, burning lice on the body , killing mice , etc.

These everyday scenes are "magic" only through the art of pictures like movies .

In historical materials, these are either not recorded, or the descriptions are far less vivid than the images, and historians will not be interested in studying such details of life.

This is the first time that film art has painted the war theme with a life-like brisk narrative mood , and this is the most authentic war life!

Presenting the brutal aspects of the battlefield, the film also does a pretty high-level job. It is still brought in from the vision of ordinary warriors, without the slightest sensational expression, just to objectively record cruelty .

Many of these fighters are under the age of 18 required for recruiting , many of them are immature, and lack the most basic common sense of war.

In the beginning, the young big boys enlisted with excitement, essentially driven by patriotic zeal and nationalism.

But when they got to the barracks and the battlefield, they discovered that the chips they had bet on were youth and life . Everything that happened on the battlefield made them fall into unprecedented exhaustion and fear, and the romantic imagination of war before was completely disillusioned.

These lads are still patterned Tucson. After marching long distances on foot, they saw the place where they dreamed of serving the motherland, but there was no surging passion, and some was a barren land like hell .

A German bombing blew up not mounds, but despair.

Looking around, you can only see corpses lying everywhere, devastated.

The enemy's firepower comes from time to time. It is very likely that the comrades next to you just talked to you, and you will be killed in the next second.

Real history cannot meet the stereotyped imagination of today's people. Therefore, we can see that the British and German sides are not completely hostile .

At the end of the war, there will not be many scenes of passionate celebration of victory in the movie, some just "there is no parade of any kind, no one speaks, everyone is paralyzed".

And the young people who returned to the UK did not get the "heroic courtesy" of traditional movies. They were faced with: "People never talk about the war, most of them are not interested at all", "They are all facing the crisis of not being able to find a job" , "Nothing has changed in their lives".

Reality is always cruel.

These young people, who have dedicated the best youth in their lives ahead , are facing elimination from society after returning to the secular world. After the zeal for collectivism cooled, they descended into utter nihilism in their spiritual life.

Perhaps the most extreme anti-war cinematic expression is, as their narrator puts it, "This war is meaningless."

If one day human beings encounter an existential crisis and can only leave a war movie for other life forms in the universe, it will be this movie.

It will convey the most extreme anti-war sentiment of our human beings , because human beings love peace.

Going to fight a war, these young people may also have one of the biggest costs is that they will have a high chance of suffering from PDST for life . (Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is defined as a result of an individual experiencing, witnessing, or experiencing one or more actual deaths involving themselves or others, or threats of death, or serious injury, or threats to bodily integrity. Individual delayed onset and persistent psychiatric disorders)

These are the parts that traditional war movies overlook.

Fortunately, there are directors like Peter Jackson who can focus on them with humanistic care. They are no longer getting old, so the movie will record their most youthful and bloody appearance in this world .

At the going down of the sun and in the morning
Whenever the sun sets, whenever the morning comes
We will remember them
we will remember them

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View more about They Shall Not Grow Old reviews

Extended Reading

Top cast

They Shall Not Grow Old quotes

  • Soldier: [waving at camera] Hi, mum.

  • Soldier: You don't look, you see. You don't hear, you listen. You taste the top of your mouth. Your nose is filled with fumes and death. But the veneer of civilization has dropped away.