Director/film artist Peter Jackson has taken contemporary World War I footage provided by the British Imperial War Museums and brought it to life. This means not just colorizing and smoothing -- it means maniacal attention to authentic details of life and death among the British Tommys in the trenches.
As Jackson would have wished, I am haunted by the sight of a battalion of young men huddled in a ditch with fixed bayonets, waiting -- expectantly, anxiously, eagerly, fearfully -- for the order to go "over the top" -- where most probably met ugly, quick and meaningless death under impassable machine gun fire. This was their war.
There were other peoples' wars. The Russian, Central European, Balkan, and Ottoman wars were probably worse, more cruel and brutal, and did not end so cleanly with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, continuing for years. And there was the war as the U.S. experienced it: despite 53,000 deaths among U.S. soldiers, neither commanding General George Pershing nor President Woodrow Wilson welcomed the end of hostilities. They had hoped for further combat to underline the superiority of U.S. wealth and power once we joined the battle in October 1917.
Jackson urges viewers to seek out members of their family who remember an older generation which lived the war. We've got only a short window left to hear those stories.
1 comment:
You might know of Dalton Trumbo's 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun, which he adapted in 1971 into a bleak film with Timothy Bottoms as the soldier. I heard of the movie ca. 1989 when Metallica's video "One" extensively used footage from it. At the time, the movie wasn't available at the video store, so when Blockbuster opened in Hilo in July 1991, it was the first movie I rented. A little later I read the book.
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