Why Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" Is So Relatable Anonymous 9th Grade

Aside from the truly remarkable and breathtaking technical achievement, what is most remarkable about They Shall Not Grow Old is how it told the story of WWI through the voices of those who fought in it, something that is so rarely done (and nearly impossible given the technological constraints of the era and a lack of recordings of World War I veterans in general). As it was explained in the making-of documentary shown immediately following the Fathom Events version of the film, Jackson and his team mined audio from BBC interview archives from the 1960’s featuring veterans of WWI to provide most of the sound for the film and to tell the story (for scenes that did not include narration, Jackson and his team hired forensic lip readers to determine what the soldiers in the film were saying and hired actors who had the same dialect/accent – which they determined through the uniforms the soldiers were wearing – to say what the cameras couldn’t pick up the soldier’s saying). In that same mini-documentary, Jackson told the audience that he wanted to create a film showing the way the soldiers would have fought it – live, in color, and with sound. In that sense, They Shall Not Grow Old tries to give a voice to those who previously did...