Hacker Cinema
They Shall Not Grow Old
2018 · Film · documentary · 99 min
Directed by Peter Jackson
A documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of Armistice Day, and the end of the war.
19 positive2 negative1 mixed2 neutralfrom 24 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
26 comments on Hacker News
The US military always seems so focused on projecting a strong image. In these times of impending threats from the East, are there enough incentives for young people to choose the military, even after their studies are finished, over the traditional academic path of college and graduate school?
Also, this reminded me of the WWI documentary from Peter Jackson, "They Shall Not Grow Old", and "Charley's War" by Pat Mills.
That is essentially what Peter Jackson did for the 2018 film They Shall Not Grow Old: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/
They used digital upsampling techniques and colorization to make World War One footage into high resolution. Jackson would later do the same process for the 2021 series Get Back, upscaling 16mm footage of the Beatles taken in 1969: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9735318/
Both of these are really impressive. They look like they were shot on high resolution film recently, instead of fifty or a hundred years ago. It appears that what Peter Jackson and his team did meticulously at great effort can now be automated.
Everyone should understand the limitations of this process. It can't magically extract details from images that aren't there. It is guessing and inventing details that don't really exist. As long as everyone understands this, it shouldn't be a problem. Like, we don't care that the cross-stitch on someone's shirt in the background doesn't match reality so long as it's not an important detail. But if you try to go Blade Runner/CSI and extract faces from reflections of background objects, you're asking for trouble.
It can be fun seeing something upscaled as a thought experiment on what life was like at a different time, it doesn't take much away from the original film imo.
Also, They Shall Not Grow Old was made in 2018 before the recent AI boom. It was an experimental and ambitious film at the time but I'm sure it could be done much better today.
Sigh. I haven't seen the True Lies transfer so I won't comment on that. But I have to take issue with that 4k 60fps clip ("The lumiere family goes on a trip 1895") and They Shall Not Grow Old.
The author calls both "disgusting" and "really fucking bad". I'm sorry, but I think they're both incredibly impressive feats of engineering and super impressive. Both films have done something which is otherwise impossible with original, grainy, out-of-sync b & w footage: Given us viewers a sense of immersion and realness that we'd otherwise be unable to experience.
None of us know what it was like to see the world of 1895 or 1914. And grainy black and white footage doesn't change that. But 4k 60fps footage gives us a true sense of "being there" and in that reality and I think that's damn incredible (and I'm thankful for it).
I think the author err'd using documentary footage as an example of what's bad about this. Taking an old film (a piece of art) and upscaling it is one thing. Taking real-world footage and making it more real is another thing entirely.
If this interests you then you might like to check out “They Shall Not Grow Old”[0] - a Peter Jackson movie which is based off AI/ML restored[1] WW1 footage with color, sound, and dialog added to silent B&W original stock.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds
Quite often, colorized pics and movies have people wear blue-ish clothing, which is fairly unbelievable. It's a gimmick that produces an effect that's not quite right for a goal for which it's not suitable. Because what is it that colorizations try to achieve? To make people think "Oh, so that's how it looked back then"? Then there shouldn't be errors in the image. And if it makes the pictures more relatable, or whatever handwaivy arguments are being thrown around, then non-colorized pictures will become even less relatable, in effect alienating people from recent history (if you believe such arguments).
I'd like to make one exception, though, for They Shall not Grow Old. That was impressive.
Counterexample: They Shall Not Grow Old, a WW1 documentary film with mostly colorized footage with recreated audio. The film was commercially successful and I found it to be a great watch.
Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here.
If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off.
Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war.
He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc.
I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again.
I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing.
That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence.
Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way.
Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old
[1] https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH
"British teeth": I thought those were a thing of the past.
They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson's brilliant modernizing of WW I film footage, has some really shocking teeth. This was before NHS, obviously.
I could never manage to smile with my teeth showing, normally, but I got a guy to film me with my dog, and then it was easy. Doesn't help for the corporate headshot, though.
Thanks. I'm not Russian, and if someone says WW1 is largely forgotten there, I'm doubtful, but I'm hardly in a position to argue.
It's mostly forgotten in the US, for that matter. I think the last living veteran of that war died recently. Peter Jackson's recent cleaning up of the movie footage for "They Shall Not Grow Old" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1 was heart-rending.
I'd like to see it used for converting old movies to hi-res and color.
Like what Peter Jackson did for "They Shall Not Grow Old".
I'm very interested in this.
It got some weird pushback, but Peter Jackson's film "They Shall Not Grow Old" really helped make it's subjects so much more real by cutting through the limitations of the old footage from the 1st World War. Being able to apply similar techniques more cheaply and quickly will bring a lot of old footage to life and make the past much more real for the viewer.
If you look at the war documentary "They shall not grow old" you may come to the same conclusion. A good portion of people in that era were malnourished. If I recall correctly, the documentary mentions the army had to do a fair bit to get recruits into shape (by feeding them well and putting them through training).
Lack of dental and fluoridated water may be another factor. I suspect back then it was also more common to smoke.
I saw this on Reddit the other day and have read some of the worries from historians about changing history.
I view this as one half of the equation, if people can relate to the past more (like WW2 in HD, They Shall Not Grow Old) etc, then suddenly they can connect and understand that human problems have always been around and we aren't so different.
As long as we can balance that effectively with the historical preservation part I'm all for using things such as ML upscaling/recoloring etc in order to make the past much more accessible.
I had the opportunity to see the Apollo 11 documentary on the IMAX last year when it came out, it was one of the most incredible movie experiences of my life and helped me to "get it" in regards to how the people acted, the public's reaction, enthusiasm etc.
Consider the film "They Shall Not Grow Old" in which WW1 footage was painstakingly restored and colorized. They went and found old uniforms and weapons to check the colors. They went to the present-day locations to check the colors of the grass and trees. Etc.
I can empathasize with the argument to keep the film unmolested and not for snobby reasons like that.
I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in black and white.
My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.
> Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.
This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.
And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize that the people in that old footage are just like you and me, and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it look recent.
Wow, I never would've thought this would be an issue -
If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today.
Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it."
Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
From the article...:
"That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage.
"For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”
An interesting look at the film and Jackson’s selectivity:
https://kottke.org/18/12/against-peter-jacksons-they-shall-not-grow-old
A bit off topic, but I recommend that anyone interested in this watch They Shall Not Grow Old (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds) - it's an excellent documentary, a bit of a passion project by Peter Jackson to polish up a lot of old WW1 footage (normalized the frame rate, since it was hand cranked, colorize, and add sound - he hired lip readers and voice actors from the same regions as the filmed soldiers). It makes it seem much more relatable and real, in a way that comically-fast black and white footage really doesn't.
One good application of this tech is old movies with poor frame rates. The WW1 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old uses a technique like this.
"They Shall Not Grow Old" is probably the closest popular documentary I can think of to your ideal (that focuses on humans at least) -- and it still implicitly needs to weigh in on some narratives, for instance the evolving thinking on "did the generals undervalue their soldiers' lives or were they learning as fast as they could?".
If you really care about what happened at X, you have to read/watch/listen to multiple sources and synthesize. No one will do that for you without injecting their own conclusion.
fwiw, watching 2 documentaries and reading a HN thread is already more research than I ever expected to do on a failed festival.
Specifically, Jackson et al. chose a 3D conversion company to do the coloring, because one of the steps in a conversion is to separate out the various parts of the frame. So much of the work was already done.
I "liked" this movie, as much as anyone can like seeing dead bodies. It really makes you realize how much most war movies, fiction or not, leave out. I wonder to what extent the lack of the true horrors results in a pro-war propaganda film, regardless of the intent of the director. Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket tries to be realistic in a sense, but still glamorizes war. It takes a documentary like "They Shall Not Grow Old" to give the full picture.
I saw the They Shall Not Grow Old screening here in Atlanta. What Peter Jackson has done with virtually unusable footage is absolutely spectacular. Both the film, coloring and sound work is amazing.
Despite the absolutely spectacular footage. I thought the documentary itself was OK. It uses audio from people in British WWI regiments to tell the story—all from BBC and Imperial War Museum recordings. It was a good execution given the constrains, but there's no real angle or conclusions to draw from the documentary.
The real gem was the interview with Peter Jackson after the movie. It covered the restoring process—much of which is covered in the article. They basically used computer software to move the frame-rates from 12 to 16 fps up to 24 fps. Then tweaked the highlights and shadows. There's a ton of work that went into color and sound as well.
I hope these techniques can be used to restore other old footage.
Tell me this documentary won't change your mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds
(They Shall Not Grow Old)
I believe that Peter Jackson's recent endeavour in cleaning up WW1 footage employs significant ML for de-noising, frame interpolation, and colorising. I haven't seen the final film, but some of the clips are staggeringly good: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-45884501/peter-jackson-lord-of-rings-director-s-ww1-movie-they-shall-not-grow-old-opens
Edit: Here's maybe a better link -- https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-45803977/peter-jackson-world-war-one-footage-brought-to-life-by-lord-of-the-rings-director