Mr. Tolkien’s War: A Review of Peter Jackson’s ‘They Shall Not Grow Old,’ by Rob Bokkon

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Anyone who knows me at all well can tell you that I don’t really have a personality, per se: what I have instead is a gigantic amalgamation of obsessions. Fandoms. Things like the life and work of Prince Rogers Nelson. Hungarian cuisine. The history of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.  The films of Peter Jackson. The Great War.

So, obviously, when word came through that those last two things were colliding, in the form of a documentary commissioned by the Imperial War Museums, I was nearly beside myself. If anyone could capture the horror and the bravery of the Great War, it’s the guy who gave us the Pellenor Fields and the Battle of Five Armies on the big screen. I counted the days until the release date. I jabbered about it to all three people I know who love WWI as much as I do. I was, to put it mildly, stoked.

Which remained my default state right up until I sat down in the theater to absorb what I truly hoped would be a modern masterpiece. The truth, as always, was rather more complicated.

The version we saw was bookended by both an introduction, and making-of featurette, from Mr Jackson himself. It is my current understanding that the greater theatrical release of the film will not include these, which is a pity, as the film loses much of its impact when one is unaware of the sheer labor of love involved in the restoration of the old footage. And, of course, consider yourselves warned that SPOILERS ABOUND, both for the film and for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The theater was almost three-quarters full, which surprised us; the crowd was fairly diverse, but included a high proportion of fit middle-aged guys in outdoor-pursuits gear, who by their conversation seemed mostly to be veterans. We live in a university town, so the history dorks (us) were also well-represented. The former dean of the college of arts and letters was there. Enthusiasm was high.

And then we fucking sat there for thirty solid minutes. Not thirty minutes of previews, mind you, but some “edutainment” compiled by Fathom Features that consisted of an “interactive” quiz, six multiple-choice questions about the Great War–“Did the Great War take place in A: 1914-1918, B: 1861-1865, C: Never, D: Last Week” and “Was Baron Von Richtoven, aka the ‘Red Baron’, a A: toilet cleaner in Bournemouth, B: your mom, C: a famous WWI flying ace with 80 confirmed kills or D: the inventor of owls?”–designed for people who have never heard of the Great War.

But when the film finally began, and the rowdy high-schoolers three rows back finally shut up, absolutely everyone in the room was transfixed.

Because this movie is stunning.

It begins and ends with images of the war with which we are familiar, in shades of silver and black and white, complete with the sound effect of an antique projector. The voice-overs are the voices of old men, disconnected from their source, joined to past time and image only by association. Jackson’s decision to jettison traditional narration in favor of archival recordings from Great War veterans is meant to grant immediacy to the film by immersing the viewer in direct experience rather than received history.

The question that must be asked is, “Does this work?” And the answer is, yes and no. While my socialist soul champions the decision to represent the War exclusively from the perspective of the people who actually fought the damn thing, the narrative feels tailored nonetheless. Blame it perhaps on the source material, as the archival audio was taken from something like 600 hours of interviews done in the ‘50s and ‘60s by the Imperial War Museums, who clearly have their own version of the War they wish to promote. A version of the war where the sun still has not set on the British Empire, George V regards us all favorably from the wall of every post office, the tea is hot and everyone knows their place.

Still from Peter Jackson’s ‘They Shall Not Grow Old.’

There are moments—a few—in the voice-overs where a note of fatalism or horror or even protest will arise. Mild moments, expressed with little fervor, which seem to be included only to evoke veracity. At the end, we get a series of voices reminding us that war is useless, pointless, a waste. A series of voices that feels tacked-on, as though we as an audience of modern sensibilities expect to hear this condemnation. Overall, throughout the film we hear the stories of Tommies who were happy to be there, who’d “go over again,” who missed it when they left, who saw it as “a job of work that had to be done.” Is this the overarching experience of the average British soldier in the war?

My reading has told me otherwise. Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That certainly seems to indicate otherwise. Siegfried Sassoon would undoubtedly curl his lovely aristocratic lip at the very notion. Is it worthwhile to hear these voices, these stories? Absolutely. Is it honest? This I cannot answer, but I have doubts.

But never mind that. You’ll forget all your criticism, all your doubt, if just for a moment, when that color footage hits the screen.

Jackson has always directed with a cinematographer’s eye, and this film is no exception. The first few shots of Tommies arriving in France, clad in khaki (a very authentic shade of khaki, as it turns out; Jackson spent weeks getting the color exactly right from uniforms in his private collection, since Peter Jackson is the world’s biggest World War I geek), baring their very British smiles for the camera: these are enough to make you forget that this footage ever existed in another form. The color used is not the bright and hyper-real shading of a modern film. The tones are very much those of a color photograph from 1914, which just serves to make the images seem more immediate and real.

The soundtrack at this point becomes a thing of pure artifice, but what artifice—Jackson’s otaku devotion to detail has never been showcased to greater effect. As revealed in the making-of featurette at the end, lip-readers were employed to pore over the footage and to reconstruct all possible dialogue. Then, by identifying uniforms or cap-badges, Jackson was able to place the regiments, and based on their origins (Royal Welch, Lancashire, &c.) actually found actors from the appropriate locales and hired them to do the voice-overs.  Further, every boot hitting the mud, every rustle of a rucksack, every clank of a helmet being thrown to the ground is there.

My jaw stayed on the floor for a long while. It is beautiful, there’s no denying that. It is a labor of love. And in true Peter Jackson style, the camaraderie of camp life, the minor inconveniences and sanitary arrangements, or rather the lack thereof, the cheerful bitching about the cheap beer and wretched cigarettes lasts only a little while, to be replaced by the screaming terror of battle and its stomach-turning consequences. Jackson has never pulled his punches when it comes to revolting images (if you’ve ever seen Dead Alive or Meet the Feebles you’ll know what I’m talking about) and this film is no exception. Popcorn went untouched when the images of trench foot, bloated corpses, maggots and rats swarm across the screen.

And yet, it is here that the film reaches its greatest artistic heights. Again and again I was reminded of the works of Otto Dix. For those who don’t know him, Dix was an enthusiastic volunteer for the German army in 1914, whose drawings from the front remain a poignant and disturbing testament to the aesthetic impact of conflict. His true fame came during Weimar Berlin, which earned him the enmity of the Nazis, who denounced him as a “degenerate artist.”

In They Shall Not Grow Old, a shot of a disemboweled cavalry horse strongly recalled Dix’s Horse Cadaver, the animal’s ruined body a testament to the service of all the animals who aided in the war effort.

Otto Dix, “Horse Cadaver from the War.”

Many times Jackson shows bodies dangling, untended and ignored, from barbed wire, akin to those from the War Triptych or the obviously named but no less striking Corpse on Barbed Wire.

Otto Dix, “Near Langemarck (February 1918).”
Otto Dix, “Corpse on Barbed Wire.”

A group of Tommies, exhausted, huddled together in their trench, are positioned almost exactly like Dix’s Resting Company, the only difference their uniforms. The parallels were too obvious to ignore; Jackson, in his years of searching through the footage provided by the War Museums, had clearly searched for and found footage that matched the works of Dix. Otto Dix, perhaps more than any other artist, truly captured the soul-killing dread and visceral, bleak reality of this war. Jackson, in his deep and thorough understanding of his subject, chose images echoic of Dix’s in order to evoke in the viewer that same sense of despair, of resignation, of trauma. This conscious homage is my favorite takeaway from Jackson’s film.

Whether conscious or not, however, Jackson’s most prominent homage, and ultimately the film’s downfall, lies in its obvious parallels to his most famous subject matter: the works of Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien served in the Lancashire Fusilliers, as a signal-officer. He saw action at the Somme and lost two of his closest school friends to the War.

The narrative structure of They Shall Not Grow Old is, almost exactly, that of Lord of the Rings. A group of brave, innocent Englishmen/hobbits, inadvertently forced away from the comforts of hearth and home, reluctantly but bravely sally forth to do their duty in the face of certain destruction. Along the way, their innocence is lost. They confront unimaginable evil and emerge scarred, only to return home to a land unwelcoming, hostile, entirely changed from the one they left.

Of course, Jackson cannot be blamed for telling the truths of the War; this narrative, though romanticized and muddled, parallels the experience of many Englishmen during the War. It was certainly Tolkien’s narrative. It is the very Englishness of the narrative that presents us with the film’s biggest problem, one Andria Williams (of the Military Spouse Book Review, and a Wrath-Bearing Tree editor) also covered extensively in her review, which is that of representation.

To the casual viewer, seeing They Shall Not Grow Old leaves one with the clear impression that the entire Great War was fought by the British infantry and artillery, more or less single-handed.  The French of course are mentioned, and even seen in a few shots, but overall the collection of images on the screen is of British, Welsh, Scots and Irish troops, every face a white face. The British West Indies Reserves are never seen. The film is innocent of a single Sepoy, there are no Gurkhas, no Malays.

In the featurette at the end of the film, Jackson addresses these concerns with a literal wave of the hand and a dismissive remark about the focus of the picture and the material available to him, while the screen actually shows unused footage of black troops, giving the lie to his explanation even as he offers it. What really pissed off your humble reviewer was the sentence Jackson used to cap this segment of the featurette: “This is a film by a non-scholar, for non-scholars.”

Wow. OK. Certainly it’s not an academic film, but to suggest that giving representation only to white British troops on-screen is in some way justifiable because the film is “by a non-scholar” rubbed me the wrong way. Mr Jackson, you’re going to tell us that you, the man who owns a closetful of original WWI uniforms—the man who literally minutes before was showing off his collection of actual Great War artillery pieces—the man who admitted to owning every issue of The War Illustrated magazine—you, of all people, would offer this lame excuse?

I think the issue here is not an actual dishonesty on Jackson’s part, however. I believe that his inability to see his own biases stems from a long association with the works of Tolkien, in which the War of the Ring is fought and won by the Men of the West, the people of Gondor and Rohan. (Although as noted by other viewers of this film, even Tolkien’s coalition was more diverse than the one shown in They Shall Not Grow Old—at least the Fellowship included elves and dwarves).

The issue of Tolkien’s source material, and whether or not it is actively or casually racist, is one that encompasses far too great a scope for this review. Certainly Tolkien did not think himself a racist, and was a vocal opponent of Nazi racialist theories, even going so far as to send a series of nasty letters to a German publisher who wanted to reprint The Hobbit in the late ‘30s but only after confirming if Tolkien was “arisch”—that is, Aryan. He also hated apartheid, having been born in South Africa, and was similarly vocal in his condemnation of the practice.

J.R.R. Tolkien in WWI uniform.

Yet there are Tolkien’s own works, which reflect the unthinking cultural biases of a man born in the Victorian era who came of age in the Edwardian. The nations of the East (Rhun, Harad, &c.) are all populated by dark-skinned Men who are under the thrall of Sauron.  Tolkien’s own remarks about the appearance of Orcs (found in his letters) include a distressing description of them as like “the unlovliest of the Mongol-types,” and he explicitly stated that the gold-loving Dwarves were based on the Jewish people, for whom he nurtured a public admiration his whole life, but the association is an uncomfortable one to modern thought.

In conclusion: should you see this film? Absolutely. Should you see it with caveats and reservations? Clearly. Beautiful but flawed, They Shall Not Grow Old is a necessary film, but an incomplete one.

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Rob Bokkon

ROB BOKKON MANAGES THE PRODUCTION LINE FOR A SMALL PRINTING COMPANY IN A KENTUCKY COLLEGE TOWN. HE IS CIS/BI, A 2ND GENERATION HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN, A MEMBER OF THE IWW, AND A SOCIALIST. HE WRITES, READS VORACIOUSLY, COOKS, DRINKS KENTUCKY BOURBON, AND IS (UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE) THE FIRST PERSON KNOWN TO HAVE WORN A DO-RAG AND A MONOCLE AT THE SAME TIME. HE LIVES WITH HIS WIFE, TEENAGE SON, AND TWO LEFTIST CATS.

5 Comments
  1. Watching the trailers for this film, I hoped greater representation would be corrected in the actual production. I’m disappointed to hear my hopes are dashed. That said, I can’t wait to see this. Thanks for such an informative review.

  2. I have a specific response to this portion: “My reading has told me otherwise. Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That certainly seems to indicate otherwise. Siegfried Sassoon would undoubtedly curl his lovely aristocratic lip at the very notion. Is it worthwhile to hear these voices, these stories? Absolutely. Is it honest? This I cannot answer, but I have doubts.”

    I feel you have not done enough reading on the war then, especially outside of the realm of a literary elite. Those war poets do not represent mass feelings on the war. Sassoon and Graves both did not like being called “anti-war”, and their work, in their eyes (Sassoon went onto regret the statements he made during the war, felt he let down his unit), was a testament to their camaraderie and experiences in the war. The fact remains that the vast majority of British soldiers in the war felt that it had to be fought, felt that it was worthwhile, and felt that there was “a job to be done”. These were not the tailor-made oral histories you’re making them out to be. These are some of the closest oral histories to the contemporary works that we have.

    I seriously recommend picking up a book like Richard Holmes’s “Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918” or Christopher Duffy’s “Through German Eyes: The British and the Somme 1918”, or actual diaries from the war (not memoirs written and edited after the war, but REAL diaries like those of Stapleton Tench Eachus).

    Stapleton had, for example, started the war in the Territorial Force and was sent to Gallipoli where he was wounded at the attack on Scimitar Hill near the end of the campaign. His war was effectively over, his “blighty one” prevented him from seeing combat again. He was no longer fit for active service. So what does he do? He re-enlists, this time as a signalman and is involved in the war until its end. His diaries reveal a man who feels that the war has to be fought, even if he disagrees with its specific conduct at times, he feels its worthwhile – he was someone that was wounded at Gallipoli.

    Or it’s as Dr. Stephen Badsey said in his lecture about “false memory” (available through the Western Front Association on YouTube”): The war was one of the most consistently popular wars in British history. The populace felt it had to be fought and won. The soldiers felt it had to be fought and won. Brain Bond has written a couple excellent books I’d recommend: “The Unquiet Western Front” which is about 100 pages and details how perceptions of WWI have changed over the years, and “Survivors of a Kind” in which he looks at wide variety of (British) memoirs and examines them for historical authenticity and talking about the context in which they were written. Graves for instance went on record saying he made a lot of stuff up for “Goodbye To All That” because he wanted to write a best-selling book.

    The film’s biggest flaw is that it isn’t a documentary and is being marketed as one. Jackson himself I don’t think sees it as a documentary, as you stated he’s a non-scholar making a film for other non-scholars. But it’s being marketed as one. There’s no context to the voices, no context to the events they’re describing. Different battles get mixed together, and I wholly disagree that “being shelled in 1914 is no different from 1916 or 1918”. Just from the kit you have, to the types of weapons employed, to how artillery is being used varied so quickly in that time frame.

    1. This is a really smart comment and a pleasure to read.

      My impression is not that the author is saying that Graves’s or Sassoon’s takes are the definitive ones–they are writers, and as such, part of a rareified and unusually-articulate subculture, perhaps slightly more prone to skepticism or antiwar feeling–but that Jackson *so tailors* the lines he’s chosen as to make all of his narrators sound nearly identical: as good-natured, apolitical gents who’ve stumbled into a nasty war and are every bit as good when they come out of it (albeit slightly befuddled, or possibly disillusioned). (He even includes several lines where one soldier ruminates on how good some pudding he ate was–either in boot camp or on the Front, I can’t remember, but it was such an innocent little anecdote that it felt truly part of this whole, distinct feeling Jackson was laboring to build.) I think the very specific effect Jackson creates is due in part due to 1) his natural affinity for a Tolkienesque storyline with brave, good-natured participants; 2) the fact that these narratives were recorded decades after the war, by men who had survived and who were looking back over quite a span of time; and/or 3) the interests of the Imperial Museum itself: its lines of questioning the veterans, and so forth. All of these narratives are obviously valid, as they come from the veterans themselves. But they are also cherry-picked — by Jackson’s heavy hand.

      I agree with you that it is an odd effect to have these lines disembodied from their speakers, sometimes giving the false impression that the men we are seeing on-camera are the ones having such thoughts when they were actually completely different people. For me, it causes an oddly blandifying or at least very uniform effect to the narrative, as moving as the words and images are, themselves.

      1. I greatly enjoyed reading your reply 🙂

        As to your first part, one of the things that I enjoy reading about is cultural memory of WWI and how we remember it. There are a lot of myths, if you will, associated with WWI and many of them stem from the War-Poets and “Lost Generation” of literature and how these works were used and interpreted (especially in the anti-war culture of the 1960s). These myths tend to have a lot of hold on what people think and feel about WWI, even today! That line, about people like Sassoon being “right” but the veterans in the film only representing themselves came off that way to me. It reminds me of other comments I’ve seen online – I’ve seen one person describe Ernst Junger’s “Storm of Steel” as “irritating” because, at least in retrospect, he liked the experience (Storm of Steel is its own can of worms, having had a lot of editions and edits over the years). Or another, in response to TSNGO, disagreeing outright with the veterans in the film. I had gotten a similar sentiment out of the paragraph I had quoted.

        The bit you’re thinking of might be the portion about “Tickler’s Jam”, which frequently only came in the flavor of “Plum and Apple” (immortalized in the song “Oh! What a Lovely War”!). Although I could certainly be wrong on that.

        I think your first point is definitely spot on, the feeling I got after seeing the film for the first time (I had not yet seen his “making of”) was that it very much resembled a traditional, three-act story. The “climax” of the film being “battle”. You really do see that sort of build up, from an almost idyllic pre-war life, to training, onwards to an individual’s first experiences at the front, as well as being behind the line building up to being “in battle”, when afterwards the film discusses POWs and wounded, the armistice, and then post-war life.

        And you’re not really wrong on 2) either, that’s always the challenge with oral histories. Richard Holmes actually makes essentially the same point in the introduction to Tommy, and he ends that portion with “much better to go back to what they thought at the time”. Which is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I was at least pleased to see that the oral histories Jackson crafted a narrative out of (and history really is the sorting of sources to craft a narrative) lined up decently well with what people were saying contemporarily during the time WWI was going on. I’ll cover this a bit more in my next paragraph.

        As to the third point, if I’m not mistaken, the oral histories Jackson used were actually recorded in the early 1960s for the BBC’s “The Great War”, a 26 part documentary. Fairly solid from what I understand – especially due to John Terraine’s influence. It didn’t have the names of veterans on screen (but did have their faces) only due to technological limits of the time (or so says Emma Hanna in “The Great War on the Small Screen”, an excellent book that analyzes and contextualizes different television programs that are about WWI). Oral Histories are like any other source, you analyze them, you compare them to other sources, weigh out what their biases may be, what reason someone may have for staying something, and so on. Where my disagreement comes in is that the oral histories Jackson used are fairly representative for British soldiers during the war – even in spite of the fact that they were recorded 50 years later. I certainly agree that it wouldn’t have hurt to have minorities featured, or to have other viewpoints present in the film – but from what I can tell Jackson was looking to make the most “generic” Tommy he could and boiled down the experiences of so many into a fairly general story-line. Which I think is mixed, partly because you can’t easily look more into some of the veterans and what they’re saying since there’s zero context to them, their unit, but at the same time it makes for a pretty compelling film when paired with the restored footage.

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