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March 29, 2024, 12:09:06 AM

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That Peter Jackson film about the war

Started by mjwilson, November 11, 2018, 06:41:49 PM

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DukeDeMondo

#30
I missed seeing this in the cinema over the weekend but I caught up with it on the iPlayer there this morning. I was pretty excited about it, keen to see what Jackson had pulled from the archive and what he had done with whatever he had found. Ready to be transported, most certainly.

I thought it was hugely disappointing. I think it did a serious disservice to the original materials and to the archive in general, and barring a couple of shots here or there I'm struggling to think of very much that resonated with me or connected with me in any meaningful way whatsoever. Far from bridging the gap between onscreen and off, then and now, Jackson's interventions, some clumsier than others, kept me at a perpetual distance throughout. For example, the film makes much use of shots of men gazing towards the camera, turning to look over a shoulder as they march towards fuck knows what or glancing up from whatever pool of muck and shit and piss it is that they're up to their ankles in. In the un-Jacksonised footage, presented correctly and not deliberately sped up or fucked with or "scratched" with filters to make it look all wonky, those moments are properly lacerating and unsettling, properly challenging even. Like they're expecting you to answer. Here, those gazes are so blunted and dulled by the woozy digital mask that's been pulled over everyone and everything that they barely register at all. 

Hardly any of it registers at all, once you've got over the initial shock of stuff moving at what feels like an appropriate speed and the first blooming of colour. The footage doesn't feel more "authentic" for what's been done to it, it feels immeasurably less so. The lip-syncing, whilst a properly impressive achievement in its own right, increases rather than decreases the sense of detachment from the "reality" of the events depicted. The shots of the mangled dead have been neutered by their "enhancement," far more fogged now than they were before.

By far the most affecting moments for me arrived at the film's close, when the razzle dazzling had ceased and we were left with "only" the archive footage (although I suspect even that had been tampered with, just like the footage at the beginning had been tampered with to exaggerate its supposed technical shortcomings, that the leap to JacksonVision might prove all the more astonishing) and the voices of the veterans and the crushing awareness that all that they had endured mattered fuck all to anyone in the end.

This blog articulates most of the issues I had with the film with an erudition far beyond me.

Anyway. Whatever. Well intentioned, doubtless, but I got very little from it.

Sin Agog

It did occasionally feel a bit like a deepfakes vid, except sexier.

Beagle 2

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on November 14, 2018, 12:05:52 PM
I missed seeing this in the cinema over the weekend but I caught up with it on the iPlayer there this morning. I was pretty excited about it, keen to see what Jackson had pulled from the archive and what he had done with whatever he had found. Ready to be transported, most certainly.

I thought it was hugely disappointing. I think it did a serious disservice to the original materials and to the archive in general, and barring a couple of shots here or there I'm struggling to think of very much that resonated with me or connected with me in any meaningful way whatsoever. Far from bridging the gap between onscreen and off, then and now, Jackson's interventions, some clumsier than others, kept me at a perpetual distance throughout. For example, the film makes much use of shots of men gazing towards the camera, turning to look over a shoulder as they march towards fuck knows what or glancing up from whatever pool of muck and shit and piss it is that they're up to their ankles in. In the un-Jacksonised footage, presented correctly and not deliberately sped up or fucked with or "scratched" with filters to make it look all wonky, those moments are properly lacerating and unsettling, properly challenging even. Like they're expecting you to answer. Here, those gazes are so blunted and dulled by the woozy digital mask that's been pulled over everyone and everything that they barely register at all. 

Hardly any of it registers at all, once you've got over the initial shock of stuff moving at what feels like an appropriate speed and the first blooming of colour. The footage doesn't feel more "authentic" for what's been done to it, it feels immeasurably less so. The lip-syncing, whilst a properly impressive achievement in its own right, increases rather than decreases the sense of detachment from the "reality" of the events depicted. The shots of the mangled dead have been neutered by their "enhancement," far more fogged now than they were before.

By far the most affecting moments for me arrived at the film's close, when the razzle dazzling had ceased and we were left with "only" the archive footage (although I suspect even that had been tampered with, just like the footage at the beginning had been tampered with to exaggerate its supposed technical shortcomings, that the leap to JacksonVision might prove all the more astonishing) and the voices of the veterans and the crushing awareness that all that they had endured mattered fuck all to anyone in the end.

This blog articulates most of the issues I had with the film with an erudition far beyond me.

Anyway. Whatever. Well intentioned, doubtless, but I got very little from it.

Fair enough, I have huge respect for your knowledge of film and critical eye for the cinematic, but I can only disagree about what I got from it.

The thing is, what you describe is what I expected to feel - I've never seen this sort of thing done well before. But I do think it was markedly more impressive and authentic this time around, and I think that they went about using what they produced in exactly the right way. I found that it had the same kind of visceral effect as Dunkirk did on me - not trying to give any kind of balanced summary of a complex set of circumstances, but attempting to put you in the shoes of a soldier who was there, an experience of disconnected stories, flashes of horror and humanity - confusion in sound and colour - rather than anything that made much wider sense at the time. The fluidity of the movement seemed uncannily natural to me, and did really make me feel like I was connecting with the people in the film on a higher level than on the original footage, it just brought back to life the little nuances of character that were missing in the original footage. I completely disagree about the eyes, I thought they were done well. Yes, it's a con-trick and an illusion to an extent, but no more dishonest than mattters of record retold through the filter of a historian.

I must say I usually detest any kind of between-frame filling and have all that turned off on my TV in favour of "film mode", so I wonder if it did look slightly better for that.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: Beagle 2 on November 14, 2018, 02:05:04 PM
I found that it had the same kind of visceral effect as Dunkirk did on me - not trying to give any kind of balanced summary of a complex set of circumstances, but attempting to put you in the shoes of a soldier who was there, an experience of disconnected stories, flashes of horror and humanity - confusion in sound and colour - rather than anything that made much wider sense at the time.

I haven't seen Dunkirk, but that visceral sort of sensory bombardment that you describe is something I was definitely hoping to experience with this, and it just didn't happen for me. I couldn't get close enough to what I was looking at. The techniques employed in the battle sequences, for example, the digital panning and swooping and all the rest, sucked all sense of verisimilitude out of the thing for me. All I could see was someone fucking about with the archive materials. Someone for whom the actual footage captured at the time somehow wasn't authentic enough, and only became so when it was manipulated to conform to the conventions of the modern action film. I'm all for fucking about with archive footage, fuck about with whatever you want to fuck about with, make whatever you want from whatever you want, but in this case, for me, it just didn't work.

I'm glad you got from it what you did, though. Maybe if I see it another time I might be able to get some of that also. And thank you very much for that compliment. That was a lovely thing to say. 

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on November 14, 2018, 12:05:52 PM
perpetual distance throughout.

Sake.

Mango Chimes

I think there's definitely a question of whether the 'enhancements' were truly enhancing anything. Hard to tell without a version of the film to compare to it. It's something that's going to vary person to person, I suppose.

For me, I think the steadying of the image, tidying up some scratches, running it at a natural speed and colourising it would have been the edge of it and where it could have added to the impact (and probably did).

But I was sat through a lot of this being distracted by the morphing that was going on. You can get away with it at natural speed and in clearer footage, and I suspect Jackson's film does it way more than I noticed, but when he's slowing things down it looks janky as any footage does where you're interpolating great swathes of missing frames.

There's a really unnatural feeling to a lot of the stuff in this (and not just the colourised section; early on there's men whose faces have film grain frozen on them as their face movements manipulate it around and it's incredibly distracting). Some of it being that woozy fake slow-motion. Some of it being due to explosions morphing into sharp focus out of blurry footage. Some of it distractingly looks like green-screen, as the landscape is a frozen picture with static grain whilst people and horses and carts move amongst it.

So I'm with DDM on sharing some of those distractions. And whilst a lot of the foley I think was impressive, the ADR'd dialogue sometimes felt a bit close to Monty Python. And I agree with the Twitter historian linked upthread that it is a bit weird to tell a chronological story that isn't chronological, so the positive and negative recollections are cleanly split by about an hour's worth of film.

But, fucking hell, hearing all those voices, and seeing that footage nonetheless, and the whole overwhelming pointlessness of it all... That packs a whallop. And maybe all the visual manipulation did play into that.

Retinend

I was utterly blown away by this film. A simple idea done very very well: namely the reconstruction of a sort of roundtable conversation between veterans and finding and colouring visuals that could plausibly stand in as illustrations. The transition from black to white was something that I wish I had not been forewarned of: truly it justifies the cliche "to see them with fresh eyes".

My favourite moment was seeing the British and Germans, behind British lines in the "rest" period, having somewhat jovial interactions with one another, all in spite of being ostensibly POWs and captors; how the former "took up stretcher duty" without even being asked; how many wandered around completely unguarded; that they were (if not Prussian) convinced that Prussia was the true enemy of the Triple-Entente, and that they were just much its victims.

I also liked how the narrative flowed imperceptibly from antics to horrors and surprised you at both extremes with how funny and intense it could be. The infamous trench foot has never appeared more horribly as when depicted here - even only briefly - under the guidance of the infamous gore-hound, Jackson. Much of the humour of the thing comes directly from the lively accents of a bygone era, and the unassuming grins of anonymous faces captured on film, but the editing of them together creates the sense of an entertaining round-table conversation, as I said.

My main feeling leaving the film was an odd one: that even if a war was unjust, costing lives unnecessarily, it might still have been the best time of a person's life. The ending of the film is the sort of ending that is said to "subvert one's expectations". Naturally you expect to see the throwing of hats into the air, and perhaps even some British and German soldiers hugging... but instead you see forlorn faces, rather foolish-looking in their suddenly-obsolete uniforms, and you view them with fresh eyes once again: as young men without much social standing and few prospects back home; young men about to be rendered useless; out of the sights, but not much cared for as they were in the mother breast of the army. The army made them into men, but could only give them so much, and having lived through so much, had made them men without livelihoods, having trained for a profession of war that was suddenly in short supply.


Finally, a good article that helped my understanding of the day to day life of soldiers in WW1:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836