I missed the original run, but Fathom is doing some encore showings. If you haven’t seen it and can find a showing where you are, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s Peter Jackson’s documentary about British soldiers on the Western Front during WW1. It’s amazing. I’d heard a lot of hype about it, and it exceeded my inflated expectations. It’s entirely made of restored footage from the war, with an audio track mostly from a series of interviews the BBC did in the 60’s. I’m normally skeptical of colorized film, but it really works here.
Two caveats:
It’s in 3D. If you can’t handle 3D at all, that may be a problem. Otherwise I’d still urge you to see it even if you normally don’t care for 3D movies.
It is very very gruesome.
Also, stick around after the credits to see a short piece on how they did the restoration and colorization and audio; and hear PJ’s explanation of the choices he made. When he showed an original piece of film followed by the restored piece their was an audible gasp from the audience.
Subject-wise, this is right up my alley, but I found myself thinking more about modern film technology than life in the trenches while watching it. After a while it just became a game of “spot the Brits” every time a snaggletoothed grin appeared on screen.
I don’t think the 3D is necessary to get the impact of the movie.
Basically (and PJ says as much in the post-credits “making-of” part) what they do is use modern high-tech editing, restoration and colorization techniques on the film footage to take it from the realm of the black-and-white, under/overexposed, odd frame rate, herky-jerky, wide-shot newsreel footage that we all associate with historical films, to something that is more modern and lifelike, letting us see the men in the films as real people. They went as far as to go to the places in France and Belgium where the battles took place to get the right colors for the dirt, plants, etc…
And it works. I didn’t really realize it while watching it, but it’s a lot more like watching a modern documentary or news footage, than old WWI archival footage, especially when the sound is added in- apparently they got forensic lip readers to determine what was being said, and then got voice performers from the parts of the UK where the units in question were from, so that not only the dialogue was correct, but it was pronounced correctly. And in one spectacular example, they identified the actual document that an officer was reading to his men before the Battle of the Somme and sync up the words with the actual footage of the officer reading it.
It’s a powerful example of filmmaking- it brings WWI into sharp focus as a real war, fought by real people, and not some dusty historical event that happened decades before we were born.
It was interesting to see how much green there was in certain shots. Black and white historical footage and drably-colored period pieces have combined to give a stilted, completely colorless image of the war. But before the trench warfare destroyed no mans land, it was indeed green fields over much of the front.