This, simply put, is an amazing film that everyone should be required to see. Peter Jackson has miraculously restored World War I film footage and colorized it. That is the least of the accomplishments here. There are over 50 different soldiers from Britan, England, Canada, New Zealand & Australia that were recorded around 1914 who share their stories of what we are seeing unfold on the screen. It starts out with the drafting of men as young as 16 years old, to the climax of the final rush to the German trenches & barbed wire during the final battle of the war. Much credit is given to the empathy that the English troops showed toward their captured German counterparts, as neither party wanted to be involved in this slaughter. Over one million English soldiers lost their lives in this war. The storytellers range in their emotions of being in the war from elated, to workmanlike, and sometimes feeling guilty to have taken a life they felt they didn't need to. This is a top notch transportation back over one hundred years to a time most of us don't even think about, let alone want to learn about. "They Shall Not Grow Old" shows that there is still much left to study and learn from these ghosts. We're lucky Mr. Jackson came along to help preserve the fading heroes of our past.

Jackson's remarkable looking documentary is an amalgam of archive footage (much of it originally staged for the 1916 film 'The Battle of the Somme'), with only a tiny amount of actual battle footage given the early nature of film cameras in those days, plus the more moving sight of several of the soldiers staring and smiling into camera, and thanks to skillful lip-reading, speaking through interpreted voices.

The slowing down to our standard 24fps and adding of voices is beautifully touching. I personally don't know if it was essential to colourise as some of the greys in the originals are still visible, when uncolourised black and white footage is still just as immediate (the irony is that so many war films nowadays are drained of colour anyway.) Nonetheless, it is a vivid impression of life on the Western Front that Jackson helps to create, and remains refreshingly objective to its time, reflecting the general pro-war feelings at the beginning in 1914, and through carefully selected testimonies of the many hundreds of soldiers, unfolds the story of a kind of war that had never been seen before, or hopefully never will be again. Sadly humanity never learns its lesson, as the "war to end all wars" is now better known as World War I - all the more reason for history to remind us.

You watch this film, and in some of its more harrowing scenes you can see all the visual influence that Jackson drew upon for his Lord of the Rings trilogy. He dedicated this film to his grandfather who served in the war, and watching it , on the day after my own great grandfather's birthday (who also served in WWI), it was a thought provoking moment that stayed with me for a few hours after.

A century later, Peter Jackson produced an informative and fascinating documentary about the First World War, seen by the English, in the trenches of the Bay of Somme, with dusted and colored archive images.

Almost everyone expected a brief and victorious war, which, as it was said at the time, would be "over at Christmas". The continuation was very different and became a trench war. Hygiene was deplorable until it became laughable but the atmosphere within the troops was fraternal despite the constantly oppressive atmosphere.

And we also learn that the English infantrymen regularly had a mission to capture a Fritz. Knowing that from a military strategy point of view, this is a complete nonsense, a war prisoner being systematically an useless and cumbersome dead weight, it is perhaps a pity that this documentary does not give to the audience an explicit explanation. And the only rational explanation is probably this one: to force the English infantrymen to attack the Germans, the prisoner of war being the proof of the effectiveness of their attack ...