“They Shall not Grow Old,” the WWI documentary directed by Peter Jackson (yeah, the Hobbits guy), is a masterpiece. There, I said it.

The one-of-a-kind film was released late last year for a limited run via Fathom Events, and proved to be so popular, it got a limited regular theatrical run a couple of months later. Now it’s back again for three Fathom screenings on Dec. 7, 17 and 18. Yes, you can watch it anytime on HBO, but having seen it on both TV and cinema screens, I strongly suggest that the theater is the way to go.

The film is so many things on so many levels, and is so unlike any documentary I’d seen before, I think all I can do here is heap praise, for what it is and how it was accomplished.

It’s a chronicle of British soldiers - told in off-screen oral history format - by the soldiers, years later, of their memories of being sent to France to fight the German army. I attempted to count the names of the men heard speaking on the end credits, and I believe there were 114 of them. Jackson and his crew reportedly had access to 600 hours of voice tapes, and cherry-picked from them, then strung them together to tell the story of what a typical soldier went through during training, on the battlefield, whenever they had rare “downtime” between attacks, and after they got home. Jackson also got his hands on 100 hours of previously unseen black and white footage that showed training, fighting, “downtime,” and more, and put all of that together to tell a visual story of what the men were remembering.

Someone says, “The clothing came piecemeal,” and we see civilians being handed mismatched uniforms. Someone else recalls, “I liked to be told what I had to do,” and we see new recruits being ordered around by noncoms.

The matchup of the aural and the visual is nothing short of astounding, and the film’s first 30 minutes, consisting of pre-war activities as well as rigorous training sessions, makes for an extraordinary movie experience.

Then the magic begins.

We’ve all seen scratchy old black and white, early-20th century footage, where the motions are always a little too fast because film cameras back then ran at a different speed. That’s exactly what’s on display for this film’s first half hour. Then someone says, “We knew we were getting close to the (front) line because the gunfire was getting more noisy.”

As British soldiers walk across a devastated, bombed-out landscape, the action slows down. Now, everyone is walking and moving around at normal speed. The scratches on the film disappear. It’s all been restored to pristine condition. And then, just like when Dorothy opened the door of her house and looked out for the first time onto the land of Oz, the black and white film morphs to color. But Jackson didn’t stop there. There’s suddenly much more than just the sounds of men’s voices.

He hired lip readers to figure out what people the cameras pass by were actually saying - everyday, normal talk. Then he hired voice actors to perform ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) to very realistically make it appear that these men are speaking and we can hear their words. Then he hired Foley artists - specialists who would add the sounds of gunfire and of horses and the wagons they’re pulling, of shovels hitting the ground as trenches are being dug, of matches being lit, of water being poured when the men are washing.

Soon we’re seeing and hearing (and possibly even feeling) bombs landing and exploding. The narration of the men remembering all of this continues, while everything else is added. We get the horror of war - bodies are strewn across some fields. And we get rare fond memories: Someone says, “When the war was not very active, it was like an out-of-door camping holiday with the boys, with a slight spike of danger,” and we see them playing around.

There’s a great deal more, ranging from learning how to use bayonets to dealing with prisoners to what happens when they return to civilian life. It’s all stunning. An absolute original. I’m thinking of seeing it a third time.

For information on screenings in your town, visit https://www.fathomevents.com/events.


“They Shall Not Grow Old”
Directed by Peter Jackson
Rated R