The director of "Lord of the Rings" uses top technology again, just to let us see the truth of the war.

Jaclyn 2022-01-16 08:02:10

War is a movie theme that is easy to come out of depth.

Movies about World War II are full of sweat and cattle, such as "Saving Private Ryan", "Blood Battle with Hacksaw Ridge", "A Beautiful Life", "Schindler's List", as well as the war blockbuster "Shindler's List" that Basai Jun just talked to you and was released last weekend. "The Battle of Midway", etc.

However, there are only a handful of works mentioning the First World War. Could "Wonder Woman" count as one?

But this week a movie about World War I was shown in theaters. And it’s a bit special, "They Don’t Grow Old Anymore."

If Ang Lee's "Gemini Killer" is to use technology to open up the imagination of the future of the film, then Peter Jackson's "They Are No Longer Growing Old" is to use technology to look back at the gaps in history.

600 hours of interview recording and 100 hours of video data.

There is no absolute protagonist, and there are no celebrities who have shaken the entertainment circle. "Peter the Great" just turned up a story about the First World War in the old paper.

Although the photography technology is not yet complete, the black and white film full of noise did leave the most vivid record of this war.

1

Everything started with the blood of a group of young people.

"At the time we were playing a football match with the Germans... Later we discussed and decided to continue playing with each other. After all, the declaration of war will not take effect until tomorrow."

It is this sudden news that connects the youth to the war. In the minds of that vigorous group, war has nothing to do with politics, country, or even life, but is just a trial of courage.

This happens to be the ultimate goal of war mobilization and broadcast propaganda.

In order to reproduce this period of history, Peter Jackson used a lot of draft posters, those beautiful images and passionate slogans, trying to convince the soldiers that the title of hero is beckoning to him.

In order to realize this dream about heroes, everyone tacitly collectively "becomes" the age of joining the army, and successfully became the lowest recruits in the army.

As soon as the war started, veterans were called back to the barracks to become instructors. They had to use blood lessons to tell the newcomers: obeying orders is the highest sacredness of the barracks.

As a result, the young people learned a lot of new facts:

There are no inappropriate shoes, only inappropriate feet.

Hit the target with ten bullets in one minute is a basic skill.

You can survive only by accurately stab the enemy with a sharp knife.

However, the six months of training was exhausted and boring, and the distance from the battlefield was too far. The three words "live" are really illusory.

Finally, the order to go to the front arrived.

Even if the veterans who retreated from the front line said that everything was "terrible", the morale of these newcomers who went to the battlefield was still undiminished. They didn't care where they were going.

2

As the soldiers entered the trenches, the film was finally restored to color by technical means.

But what is the background color of war?

green?

In the trenches with piles of debris, the soldiers wear green uniforms, or stand guards, maintain tunnels, or take breaks in shifts.

The scattered green amidst the noise is clearly worn on people, but not as full of vitality as the stubborn grass in no man's land.

Red?

Because of the lack of supplies, water can only be transported by oil drums. The lifelines of the soldiers are recorded on the red oil drums.

Unknown corpses hung on the barbed wire fences guarded by the enemy and ours, and the original bright red blood had solidified and turned black.

The soldiers who were in bed with the decomposing corpse had not only to dodge bullets, but also the plague and bad maggots lurking in the chaotic trenches. For this reason, the rotten "red hands and red feet" had to be chopped off directly.

Flesh?

Soldiers who use trenches as their homes have no privacy with each other. After all, life and death are the easiest to dilute morality and boundaries.

However, what is more direct than the naked meeting is that everyone has to sit on the same wooden pole to solve the tuba. Once someone falls off, they can only "see you in the dung pit, brother".

After all, because of the relationship between the state, society, and individuals, war cannot be defined by a single color.

Probably, Peter Jackson's intention to recolor these precious materials is also here.

Since the new technology can bring back the story locked in the black and white world, why not give it a try?

Of course, this kind of creation itself is also controversial—does the artistic reprocessing of historical materials touch the boundaries of reality?

Starting from the technology itself, the black-and-white images during the First World War did not have a radio function.

What the production team did was to draw a story line in a wealth of materials, and through editing to match the soldiers' oral audio with images.

In other words, when the audience sees people on the screen, it is not the speaker himself.

In order to make the audio and picture synchronization more pertinent, for the video paragraphs with dialogue scenes, we also specially find a lip language expert for language recognition and dubbing separately.

As for the ambient sound of the guns, it also corresponds to the countdown.

It has been so difficult to restore the sound. Re-coloring frame after frame of historical video is simply a protracted battle with heavy losses.

The question is, can the current color choices bear the weight of history?

The colors and images are more cordial, but they are also farther away from history.

In the category of movies, "They Are No Longer Growing Old" is classified as a "documentary". The re-arrangement and different operations of sound and picture seem to deviate from the traditional documentary production mode, and it also makes its relationship with historical reality appear ambiguous. .

Should history be used to enrich art, or should art be used to reread history?

Perhaps, after a series of stories about soldiers pissing, the movie gave a relatively correct answer.

3

If the war forced the soldiers to remain indifferent even when their small heads were cracked open, then the tanks brought an abyss of horror.

Only by writing a will can you fight this big steel guy to the death.

"I have never heard such a loud gunfire... the air is as hot as hell purgatory..."

What is the most appropriate word to describe the situation here?

massacre.

Human nature is inherently the most unpredictable. What's more, there is a group of red-eyed soldiers on the battlefield at this moment:

"That kind of numbing noise can make people abnormal. No matter how kind this person has been, all the senses are left with meaningless physiological reactions..."

Finally, the "hero dream" constructed in the beginning of the movie collapsed in the climax of the "Tank War", leaving only the real and long-term shock.

The cloak of civilization is punctured by bullets. Behind the unfair confrontation between humans and machines, it is one race that wants to ruthlessly eliminate another race.

No matter how many life details of the soldiers are used to deconstruct the war at the beginning of the movie, a director with humane care will inevitably fall back to anti-war sentiment.

The confident soldier smiled at the audience in the last second, and the next second the corpses were horrible.

The recurring montage is not conveying happiness at all, but staring at the deepest despair.

The essence of war is the confrontation of ideology and the struggle for interests.

What the soldiers hate is nothing but the imaginary enemy created in the process of national propaganda.

Once this abstract object of anger is disassembled into concrete people, it is easy to be shaken, just as this British soldier described the German prisoners of war:

"The German soldier is usually a very good person. I think he is really a barber or shopkeeper, trapped in a uniform like us."

Such deep empathy not only persists just after the war, but also becomes the creed of every survivor's future life.

Because no one becomes a hero in the end, and the returning soldiers even become the spurned people.

With the end of the war, losing the job of "soldier" not only failed to gain the understanding of family and friends, but also could not empathize with others because of this special experience.

In the war, some people's pain is very short, only waiting for the moment of death.

But after the war ended, some people suffered too long, and even spent their entire lives without getting the healing they deserved.

From mobilizing before the war, preparing for the war, going to the battlefield, and returning home after the war, "They Are No Longer Older" laid out the simplest timeline, and finally presented a way to look at history through art, but please remember, Movies can only project history, not rewrite history.

In the world of light and shadow, they no longer grow old, and we don't have to take it seriously.

But in the vast river of history, they lost their lives for unknown reasons, and finally couldn't wait to grow old, and we must remember that behind every bloodbath is an extremely painful lesson of life and death.

The picture in this article comes from the Internet

View more about They Shall Not Grow Old reviews

Extended Reading
  • Will 2022-03-26 09:01:11

    Although I knew it before, I was still stunned when the picture changed from black and white to color. The color and 3D effect made history so close for the first time, especially when I thought that everything I could see was real. The young and laughing people died suddenly, their broken bodies dissolved in the mud, and the survivors only discovered that what they experienced was nothing but nothing, and even their close relatives could not understand themselves. If there are more documentaries and movies like this, maybe there will be fewer self-righteous "wolf warriors"? (But of course not...)

  • Alessandro 2022-03-25 09:01:19

    Although the narration is so full that it is already driving people crazy, after thinking about it, I still think that I should give it five stars. This is really an unprecedented war daily life that no film will talk about (not to mention the trenches alone will blow most of the World War I films... and finally understand the weapons and equipment such as mines, guns, tanks, etc. ...), and this is the ultimate dream of a military nerd, and this is the right use of technology, a huge job of sound and color, yet so understated that it's hard to notice. The 3D design also basically only uses the positive parallax area, but the depth is done quite well, and the effect is to form a kind of "peeping" (and, looking at 2D is equal to not seeing!). Discuss the sound-picture relationship, and the rather important text of "Film as archive/found footage".

Top cast

They Shall Not Grow Old quotes

  • Soldier: [waving at camera] Hi, mum.

  • Soldier: You don't look, you see. You don't hear, you listen. You taste the top of your mouth. Your nose is filled with fumes and death. But the veneer of civilization has dropped away.