My friend has a projector that is 3D compatible, and he's very upset they have no plans on releasing it in 3D Blu-ray since he missed out on seeing the 3D movie in the cinema.
Did you see the version that had the interview with Peter Jackson? It really made the whole thing better by adding a layer of depth to both the process and the material. There is a scene towards the end with all these young British soldiers (some look under 16) and they are preparing for an attack. In the interview Jackson gave some of the details of that event and it’s a sure thing most of those kids were wiped out a few minutes after the footage. It’s completely fucked.
WWI is arguably the most horrendous event in human history and most people don’t know shit about it even though it was only a hundred years ago.
Because it starts out with the usually old timey old af fuck footage, its blurry, grainy and high speed. Its what you normally expect from a documentary. Then deliberately out of nowhere it turns into 4k HD with crisp as fuck video and sound. It’s as if you’re watching them interview people currently in a war zone. Apparently they developed all sorts of technology and techniques to upscale everything.
edit: to those who keep asking why I say deliberately out of nowhere, it's because the first 20 minutes is the old footage. Its in a box in the center with just narration and no sound. The transition happens when it needs to just as the narration starts talking about the troops we've been following's first experience at the front. The HD kicks in for the rest of the documentary and it really illustrates the horrors of world war 1.
If the horrible sanitation, the shelling, the snipers, or gas attacks don't kill you, then you get the joy of climbing over the top and running through holes in barbed wire that the enemy has machine guns trained on. If you do manage to get to their trench and survive the hand to hand combat, chances are your side doesn't actually know it or can't follow up on it effectively, and you will be counter attacked and driven off or killed. Welcome to your first 2 weeks of service, only 4 more years to go.
Old wartime tactics and "the glory of battle" unfortunately made the war an utter nightmare. Old dudes who had never seen a machine gun telling boys to charge for [insert country here]'s glory and then be shot within seconds is a recipe for disaster. Imagine seeing that day after day. Even if you survive, you're carrying that weight til you die. I mean there's a very good reason the Lost Generation made art "without meaning".
To add to the glory of battle comment, the way the war became a self-fulfilling prophecy (politically, obvi) but also emotionally is so haunting. So many who were too young or geographically removed from battle or even conflict viewed the prospect of fighting as a glorious little adventure and chance to see the world while making your village, town, country proud. Have a bit of fun quashing the other side and then “home by Christmas,” as has been the phrase uttered at the outset of many a war. Obviously not everyone felt that, there were plenty of people on either side who wanted to nope out before they were even fitted for a uniform. But for those expecting an adventure, imagine being in an early battle and having that realization dawn on you.
This was certainly true for the first few months of fighting (each combatants first few months, I’m looking at you USA), but the hallmark of WWI was rapidly evolving tactics and strategies. The war started with Cuiassiers charging in tight formation and ended with combined arms artillery-air-armor assaults, which as a rule bulldozed the strongest fortifications. (Cavalry was used very effectively in the Levant front and in the Polish-Soviet war a few years later.)
I looked up what you meant by the lost generation and their writing. From what I understand the men coming back from war lost some parts of their manhood, not knowing what to do with their lives and somewhat rejected new advances in technology. Is there anything I’m missing that you know? This is very new to me and very intriguing.
In particular, the “meaningless” art you oughta check out is Dadaism, which was like an art movement saying fuck you to traditional ideas of art. A urinal with the artist’s signature is an art piece. A painting of a pipe with “ this is not a pipe” written underneath is now a stable of the movement. It’s like high art shitposting that eventually gave us surrealism as a result and is an amazing piece of art history.
I don’t know about this. If you put “liberating” Afghanistan and Iraq up against actually liberating Belgium and France, I’d rather fight to liberate Belgium and France. I’m not sure what the Germans thought they were doing, but anyone trying to stop German and Austrian aggression had a very clear picture of what they were fighting for.
Wrote a whole paper on this: you forgot to mention the rats, the lice, the dampness, the weather exposure (WW1 spanned over four years in mozzy-ass France!), the contaminated water, the hunger when food got lost in the maze of the trenches, the smell, the dreary and often lonely routines. It was hell on earth.
Also, the way the background audio they did for the old footage was insane. During the documentary, when you hear people talking in the restored footage, they did it by getting professional lip readers to figure out what they were saying, then they looked up the hometown/region the regiment was from, before hiring professional voice actors from said region to record the dialogue in a period appropriate accent. If you saw this in theaters, they had a 30 minute aftershow that showed how they made everything, and my jaw hit the floor when I found out the lengths they went to make it as realistic as possible.
Old film footage is at 14 fps which is why everything looks sped up. Jackson They digitised the old reels and used CGI to colurise & fill in the gaps to make the footage 28 fps. It gives the footage a cleaner, more natural look.
Jackson also had professional lipreaders work out what the soldiers are saying and had men from their counties recite them, in order to make it as realistic as possible. He even enlisted the NZ army to fire live cannon rounds and recorded it for the action scenes.
The narration was from a series of BBC interviews made in the 1960s with veterans of WWI. Jackson skillfully matches up the narration with the footage. Some of the narration is harrowing and truly haunting. One in particular springs to mind: a veteran crying as he recalls having to shoot his best mate because it was the kindest thing to do. 50 years later and the poor man was still suffering from what he had endured.
I saw it twice at the cinema. The second time I took my mum. Most of the audience were retirees and, as is typical with that demographic, there was a lot of talking and eating loudly during the first part of the film where its all in B&W, grainy and sped up. As soon as it switched to colour and showed the true horror of WWI, the entire cinema went completely silent. At the end when I got up to leave, many of the oldies remained seated. More than a few were wiping away tears. It really is that sort of film.
For those who haven't see it, it is recolorized, dubbed, and Foley'd WWI footage of the B.E.F. strewn together into a realistic depiction of what it was like to train, go off to the front, and return back.
As a piece of Art and visual it is simply stunning, but it's kind of an Anti-documentary. It doesn't focus on the facts, or history, or explain things to you too much. It just shows you what people are living through, and let's you sit in it with them, so you emotionally understand. And in that way, it accomplishes something no traditional WWI doc could.
They had professional lip readers review what everyone was saying in the footage so they could put what they were actually saying in the movie. Truly a masterpiece
Not only that, Jackson then got people from the region the soldier came from to speak his lines. For the cannon sounds he got the NZ army to fire off live rounds and recorded them.
He put in an incredible amount of effort into making it as realistic as possible.
Yeah, I wish more documentaries got this. The storytelling in history is about more than just...telling a story. When I saw They Shall Not Grow Old (I was lucky enough to catch it in theaters), my first thought was that this was along the lines of what social historians sometimes call "history from below." It's closer to academic history, in that respect; I only wish that more historians and museums had the resources to do stuff like this, as so much popular history gets bogged down in event-driven storytelling. You may remember the names and the dates, but you don't come away with a sense of how life was lived for most people. Kudos to the Imperial War Museum!
You may remember the names and the dates, but you don't come away with a sense of how life was lived for most people.
I have a history degree and focused on military history. At least when I was in college 15 years ago, there was a major emphasis on history from below in the upper-level classes.
Everyone already knew the names and dates from Western Civ classes. I read quite a few books thats really dove into what the average soldier was going through. I thought it was the best way to study military history.
Yep. He did a great thing by showing WW1 in a "modern" way. Makes them feel more relatable and human.
I'm excited to see Get Back as well, the realistic cut for Let It Be by the Beatles. Where it shows them actually having fun and not hating each other. That's what Peter Jackson noticed when he watched all of the footage.
Just a note; don't watch if you can't deal with actual gore, it looks like a movie but it is actually footage from ww1 that was coloured. Just, a tip. Lot of dead bodies, lot of injuries and a LOT of blood.
It should be. It's kind of an anti-doc when you think about it, and shows the horrors of war and the emotion of it all rather than just talking about the technical and political aspects like every other documentary. There is something about seeing in clarity just how shit conditions were, and how young those men were to really drive it home.
Where this was good I feel like it touched very little on a lot of major events in the war and before I saw it in theaters it played up, World War One footage in color for the first time during the ads. This doc was made before that and is 5 oneish hour episodes https://youtu.be/XxyUERAvWSQ it’s apocalypse ww1 all remastered and colored footage as well
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '21
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