The film is back in the theater this week with several showings each day. I went yesterday to a 2D version and was astounded by the quality of the restoration. In some shots, the clarity is remarkable. The colorization was extremely well done, and I’m generally a hater of the process. Peter Jackson made absolutely the right call to colorize much of it. It’s obvious that they spent a lot more time colorizing this film that many others I’ve seen. There was gradation and subtley absent in many of the films colorized by Ted Turner back in the ‘80s or ‘90s. In one shot, you can see the ember of a soldier’s pipe glow as he inhales. It looked perfect. There was a 30-minute section following the credits with Peter Jackson explaining the making of the film. It was fascinating, even though I was already aware of many of the most interesting tidbits.
There were many shots showing soldiers smoking a pipe — sometimes while marching. What’s that called? Munting? Quite a few that I saw were army mount pipes, but there were plenty of regular pipes, too. The pipe smokers were greatly outnumbered by the cigarette smokers, however. That surprised me a bit. I thought that switchover happened a couple decades later. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how guys kept their pipes lit with apparently little effort. Maybe it’s because they’re outside in a breeze. It also struck me that these briars were inevitably exposed to all the elements, so one more bit of evidence that water won’t destroy a briar. There was one funny shot of guys relieving themselves, sitting on a plank over the latrine. One fellow on the plank was smoking a long German-style hunters pipe and reading a newspaper.
If you have a chance to see it, I urge you to go. If not, I’m sure it’ll make it to one of the streaming services soon. I’m not sure, though, that the added 30-minute segment will be in the streaming versions. More likely, it would be included as an extra on a Blu-ray release, but that’s just a guess.
