Critics reviews

The film functions less as a history lesson than an experiential deep dive into the mundane and traumatizing realities of soldiering.

The result is, in its way, as eerie and enthralling, albeit with a completely opposite emotional valence, as the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy’s world goes from black and white to color. There, it means the coming of magic; here, it means an entry to Hell.

A landmark film, at once a technological achievement, a tour de force of cinematic history-telling, and a shot over the historiographic bow in terms of its methods.

Jackson’s project seems to me truly phantasmagoric, in Benjamin’s terms. A ‘strange meeting’, to invoke Wilfred Owen’s unforgettable image, with archival ghosts in our digital midday.

It’s fascinating, and moving, because it looks into the past and unearths a spectacle of life and death; at the same time it’s horrifying, precisely because it presents life and death as spectacle.

The soldiers of WWI are here little more than motion-capture figures for Jackson’s team to drape with colour and sound and stereoscopy. An army of Gollums: not wearied by age perhaps, but certainly contemned by technology.