A few months back, after watching the first trailer for the soulless CGI spectacle Mortal Engines, we asked a question: What the hell happened to the Peter Jackson that we once knew and loved? Well, we found out on Tuesday.
Apparently Jackson has been making a World War I documentary entitled They Shall Not Grow Old, and it just skyrocketed to the top of our must-see list. And, thanks to Warner Bros., who acquired the film for US distribution (via Deadline), you may very well be able to see it before the end of the year.
The film, which holds a 93% currently on Rotten Tomatoes after a screening at the BFI London Film Festival, and it, like most of Jackson’s other work, is a technical marvel. He took film captured during the The Great War, sped it up form 13 frames per second to 24, our modern standard, colorized it, and converted the image into stereoscopic 3D to make it as immersive as possible. Here’s the director on the motivations behind this, from the Deadline article: “I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more, rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film.”
Here’s a trailer for the film, so you can see how incredible this transformation really is:
Given that the centennial of the Armistice that ended fighting on the Western Front falls on November 18 of this year, you might expect They Shall Not Grow Old to hit theaters right around then. It’s already missed the deadline for Oscar contention, so it’s not being held up by that particular restriction. But there’s no word on a release date just yet, though we’ll be sure to update you when and if that changes. We will just say how good it is to have Peter Jackson back, and that we missed him deeply.
Featured image via Wingnut Films.
