Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Thomas Adlam, William Argent, John Ashby, Attwood, Walter Aust, Donald Bain DIRECTOR: Peter Jackson PRODUCTION: Imperial War Museums, WingNut Films, 14-18 NOW, House Productions

Box Office Performance

They Shall Not Grow Old earned $17,956,913 domestically and $2,947,275 internationally, for a worldwide total of $20,904,188. The film skewed heavily domestic (86%), suggesting strong North American appeal.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

14–18 NOW and the Imperial War Museum (IWM) co-commissioned the film, in association with the BBC, approaching Jackson about the project in 2015. According to Jackson, to make the film, he and his crew reviewed 600 hours of interviews from the BBC and IWM, and 100 hours of original film footage from the IWM. The interviews came from 200 veterans, with the audio from 120 of them being used in the film.

After reviewing the footage, Jackson decided the film would not feature traditional narration, and would instead only feature audio excerpts of the soldiers talking about their war memories, in order to make the film about the soldiers themselves. For the same reason, few dates or locations are identified in the finished film.

Jackson did not receive any payment for the making of the film, and Jackson grew up hearing stories about William's experiences in the war from his father. According to Jackson, making the film gave him "a greater understanding of what my grandfather would have gone through".

▸ Music & Score

The film's music was composed by Plan 9, a New Zealand trio consisting of David Donaldson, Steve Roche, and Janet Roddick.

The closing credits of the film feature an extended rendition of "Mademoiselle from Armentières", a song that was particularly popular during WWI. Jackson did not decide to use the song until late in production, so there was only a short time to assemble the performers to record it. As he was in New Zealand, but did not want to have locals sing the song in British accents, a group of British men in service to the UK government were recruited from the British High Commission in New Zealand to perform the song.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Nominations: ○ IFFR audience award (48th International Film Festival Rotterdam)

Additional Recognition: The film was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary at the 72nd British Academy Film Awards, but lost to Free Solo, which also won that years' Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 99% of 157 critics' reviews of the film are positive, with an average score of 8.7/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "An impressive technical achievement with a walloping emotional impact, They Shall Not Grow Old pays brilliant cinematic tribute to the sacrifice of a generation." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 based on reviews from 26 critics, indicating "universal acclaim", and it is labeled as a "Metacritic must-see".

In a five-star review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called the film "a visually staggering thought experiment", and wrote: "The effect is electrifying. The soldiers are returned to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes, like ghosts or figures summoned up in a seance. The faces are unforgettable. [...] The details are harrowing, as is the political incorrectness of what the soldiers recall: some express their candid enjoyment of the war, others their utter desensitisation to what they experienced."

Guy Lode of Variety called the film "a technical dazzler with a surprisingly humane streak", stating: "if They Shall Not Grow Old is head-spinning for its jolting animation of creakily shot battle scenes—tricked out with ingeniously integrated sound editing and seamlessly re-timed from 13 frames a second to 24—its greatest revelation isn't one of sound and fury. Rather, it's the film's faces that stick longest in the mind. Through the exhaustive transformation completed by Jackson's team, visages that were all but indistinguishably blurred in the archives take on shape, character and creases of worry, terror and occasional hilarity.