Box office
They Shall Not Grow Old grossed $18 million in the United States and Canada, and $3.7 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $21.6 million.[4]
In the United States, the film was screened as part of a one-day presentation through Fathom Events on 17 December 2018 and grossed $2.3 million, setting a record for a documentary showing through the company. Encore screenings were held on December 27, making $3.4 million from two showtimes at 1,122 cinemas. It was the highest-grossing single-day total ever for a documentary playing via Fathom, and one of the top-grossing single-day presentations of any kind from the company.[21] On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the film grossed an additional $2.6 million from 1,335 cinemas.[23] The film had a general release in 735 cinemas on 1 February 2019 and made $2.4 million, finishing 10th.[24]
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 156 reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The website's critical 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."[25] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating based on reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 based on 26 critics, indicating "universal acclaim"; it is labeled as a "Metacritic must-see".[26]
Giving the film a five-star rating, Peter Bradshaw in his review for The Guardian called it "a visually staggering thought experiment", saying "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."[27]
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. In conjunction with the film's intricately stitched narration, its soldiers turn from cold statistics to warm, quivering human beings, drawing us with renewed empathy into a Great War that, they all but unanimously agree, had precious little greatness to it."[28]
Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter stated that the film "suggests new cinematic methods of rescuing history from history books, humanizing and dramatizing true stories with a modest injection of movie-world artifice. Some critics may object to how Jackson streamlines and elides real events, stripping away specifics while offering no broader socio-political comment on the war. But as an immersive primer on the first-hand experiences of British soldiers, this innovative documentary is a haunting, moving and consistently engaging lesson in how to bring the past vividly alive."[29] Mike McCahill of IndieWire gave the film a B grade, considering that "the filmmaker's extensive restoration project doesn't always provide new insights, but it succeeds at creating a fresh look at the horrors of WWI."[30]
The response was not universally positive, and particularly among archivists and film historians some concerns were raised about the ways in which the film erased the original filmmakers, manipulated the image through colourisation[31] and other techniques[32] and implied that the original footage, much of which had been extensively restored by the IWM archives, was in disrepair.[33]
Others have questioned the authenticity of the soundtrack which was constructed from lip reading and oral history archives and which has been given less critical attention that the colourisation techniques.[34] Historians have argued that while lip reading reveals the words that were spoken, it does not necessarily represent regional accents or changes in pronunciation over the intervening century.[34]
Accolades
It earned a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary,[35] which was won by the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature winner Free Solo.[36]
