The film They Shall Not Grow Old was a spectacular documentary about British soldiers fighting in the trenches during World War I. It experiments with a new way of portraying history in a digital form, by enhancing old footage from the war with color and sound. It takes the typically dull black-and-white film and breathes new life into it, giving it a more realistic and less detached feel. Although the events portrayed happened over 100 years ago, the film allows you to empathize and connect with the individuals who experienced them as though it happened yesterday.

The film does an incredible job of fleshing out the original footage into a completely new scene. It adds many dimensions to the original black-and-white footage by introducing sound and color. Being able to hear not just the sounds of war and fighting, but the other side as well with laughter and the soldiers joking amongst one another, made the film a rather surreal experience. The film excels at appealing to emotion and getting the viewer attached to specific soldiers or “characters” in the footage. It makes it much more heart-wrenching and difficult to watch when the same people and faces you have been getting to know are suddenly shown on the ground covered in blood and dirt. The strategic use of macabre footage in this film to trigger a primal response is simply amazing. The addition of color also brings in so much more detail and gives the movie a unique vibe. The slight haziness of the color overlay gives the soldiers a very cool almost ghostly appearance. It also makes the film feel as though it didn’t take place a century ago, but rather much more recently. It is crazy to think that I am currently the same age or older than many of the people featured in the footage, at around 20 years old.

Hearing the narrators talk about specific memories they have from their days on the battlefield was yet another aspect of this film that created a more intimate dynamic with the viewer. Some of them could be heard choking up or being brought to tears when talking about certain moments. During the scene towards the end of the film, when the British rushed into the territory of the Germans and killed in their words “anything that moved,” several things stuck with me. For one, this was right near the end of the war, so many of the soldiers were simply worn out and tired of the war lifestyle, and hearing the narrators talk about how desensitized they had become to stepping over dead bodies and seeing people with horrible mutilations was very eye-opening. It reinforced my existing feelings about how utterly awful war can be and usually is. Also, hearing the narrators speak on the Germans they captured, and how they were actually glad to be captured because it exempted them from any more fighting and terror, was something that I could not help but notice.

This film is quite the experience, from the raw commentary of real British soldiers to the colorized depictions of 100 year old war scenes. It is unlike any World War I documentary I have seen, and I can only imagine the painstaking work it took to so beautifully bring to life the footage from the museum.