If you have seen any of the black and white archival film footage from the First World War, you will most likely remember grainy, shaky, juddering images of soldiers on the Western front.  The original film stock, itself of poor quality, has deteriorated further in the hundred years since the end of the war. When the Imperial War Museum in London was looking for ways to mark the centenary of the Armistice and approached Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of The Lord of The Rings, Jackson saw an opportunity.  Could 21st century technology and editing techniques rescue the ageing celluloid and create a fitting and permanent monument to the hundreds of thousands of men who gave their lives in “the war to end all wars”.

The result is simply extraordinary.  Jackson and his team took the museum’s hundreds of hours of film and its enormous collection of audio reminiscences and created a 100-minute documentary that is simply a work of art.  And, in a move that could have flopped horribly but which triumphs completely, Jackson took the decision to colorize the original black and white film.  The technology of colorization has clearly come a long way because the results presented here, though not consistently perfect, feel natural and authentic.

Film and technology geeks will love what was achieved here and will be delighted by the 30-minute appendix to the documentary in which Jackson describes how the work was done.  But what really matters is the recovery of those faces and voices from a hundred years ago, the faces and voices of the resilient, the brave, the frightened, and the dutiful. The restoration forever of the lives extinguished and the voices silenced, some just a few hours after the original films were first recorded.