Editorial: Jackson's WWI in colour a fine end to the centenary

Editorial

COMMENT: Film maker Peter Jackson has already done a great deal for his country. His films have projected New Zealand to the world, his studios and their spin-off production units have given the country a global competitor in the movie business and, off-screen, his interest in the Great War has resulted in a magnificent personal collection of World War I equipment and artefacts that have been the basis of an absorbing public exhibition in Wellington throughout the centenary of the war.

Now as Armistice Day approaches, Jackson has produced a documentary film that could be his finest contribution to the four-year commemoration. The production, entitled "They Shall Not Grow Old", premiered in London yesterday to very good reviews. Its conception was simple as it was brilliant. Jackson wanted to see the war in realistic colour and he knew how to turn images on black and white footage of the time into images more like those we would have seen were we alive at the time.

Reviewers are talking about how much more immediate the war seems, unlike the fading grey tones of archive film which make events seem so long ago. The other thing they notice is the youth of the soldiers. With faces flesh-toned rather than grey, they say, audiences will be moved by the realisation that those who went, fought and died for their country were so very young.

The Daily Telegraph's review called it, "an historical portrait of matchless immediacy and power, in which young souls lost in a century-old war stare out across the years and meet our gaze". The reviewer said, "The carnage is depicted with total fearlessness and frankness: flies swarm on corpses, flesh is thrown up like rags, soldiers are seen trembling with shell shock, while the shells themselves explode with terrifying fury and speed."

It sounds like a fitting climax to the centenary, a thundering and tender reminder of how terrible and tragic that war was. It lasted so long that the centenary has probably exhausted the interest of most people. New Zealand made much of the Gallipoli centenary in 2015 and duly recalled the Somme in 2016 and Passchendaele a year ago. But every time it became hard to sustain interest in events of mind-numbing horror it was a reminder of how much harder it must have been for those alive at the time, living with the horror and not knowing when it would end.

In a little over three weeks it will be the centenary of the end, November 11, Armistice Day. If it is proving hard to give due thought to the war's last centenary, that response is historically fitting. Historians tell us the armistice was not greeted with the scenes of public jubilation familiar from newsreels of World War II conclusions. People were too exhausted, families and communities too depleted, too many young men were maimed for life, too many were not coming back.

And an armistice did not sound conclusive. Indeed it lasted only 20 years but the second war, thankfully, would not be the same. Jackson is giving World War I's centenary a fitting and memorable conclusion that might never fade.