They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

Peter Jackson's World War I documentary takes period footage, restores it, colorizes it, adds some sound effects and overlapping narration from the oral histories of veterans, and makes that conflict come alive in a way it hasn't before. I saw the movie on a big screen and in 3D and the effect, especially early on, is kind of staggering, it is surreally real and immediate. However sadly after a while you get a bit inured and it loses some of its immediacy. The effort is hampered somewhat by the lack of actual battle footage from the war, camera equipment of a hundred years ago being particularly lugubrious and not suited to capturing trench warfare. Battle aftermath, life in the trenches, basic training, ect that they could capture, and you get a real sense of that. I would say the sequences of trench life were by far the most powerful in the film, trench war for me has always seemed like it would a special kind of hell, and you don't have to see much of this footage to know that you want no where near that kind of combat environment. I am extremely glad this movie exists and would be hard pressed to think of a better way to communicate the war to students. ***