Even if you didn't see it, you probably know something about it.
If you're on the fence or missed it in the theaters, I highly suggest watching it.
You probably won't learn anything new in the larger sense, but this is not a documentary about the war as a whole or any particular battle. It's simply about the life of the British soldier on the front line. Consequently, what you learn are facts about how they lived (and what the British will do in order to make tea! And how many underage soldiers there may have been) and what they felt (or their recollections of such - the audio is mostly from BBC recordings and Imperial War Museum interviews, but i don't know how far after the fact they were conducted) and how they felt about it after. Individual names, dates and place names were purposely left out of the film to convey the "every-soldiers' experience".
There are some absolutely breathtaking sequences - not in the, "What a lovely sun rise over the mountains." manner of breathtaking, but of the "HOLY S***!" kind of way - like men and horses coming under artillery fire or the heaving of the earth skyward as explosives are let lose underground (around 1:42 in the trailer for example).
Technically, the film is a marvel - the colors are vivid and natural looking and images are mostly quite clear, something that could not be said of much of the footage prior to restoration by Peter Jackson's team. There were some weird things, where the people in the background were moving but the foreground seemed static - I'm not sure if that was an artifact of the digital restoration, the change in film speed, or a production trick done for emphasis (the background motion in these cases often wasn't of any particular interest, the camera was emphasizing the faces of the men).
Honestly, I think my only criticism was that it wasn't longer - while it didn't feel rushed, they had over 100 hours of footage, and the film run time is less than two hours.
Wikipedia link
It is a fantastic doco. I was watching it again in the weekend. There's some amazingly insightful bits, like when a wounded British soldier drops his shoulder into a German prisoner.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated that shoulder drop being shown while the voice over was primarily about how the soldiers on both sides weren't that different/respected each other. A welcome moment of levity.
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