User Reviews

For all of us,when we think about ww1,we imagine everything in black and white.This excellent documentary change this for good. The picture is not perfect,but is very good. The narrator(Kenneth Branagh)is excellent,and the music is epic.Actually the narrator is one of the best i have ever heard in a war documentary,along with Sir Michael Redgrave and Sir Laurence Olivier. Now on the actual content,the details about the battles,the weapons and the statistics,the colored footage and the interviews from the veterans,all combined together in every chapter works fine.As a matter of fact everyone wants to see Red Byron's plane flying as it really was.Red. Too bad that the veterans are only British,i would also like to see and hear an interview from the other side,but that's OK.Also there are not so many details about the politics or a prologue chapter about the era before the war,but you can see queen Victoria in the late 90s for example,and hear some information about politics of that time. Great job,this is one of the best docs about ww1

Kenneth Branagh can in many ways be considered the Laurence Olivier of our times, which might sound stupid since an actor of Olvier's calibur can never again be replicated, but I'm not kidding here. Branagh has narrated many things that I can see Laurence being the narrator of, and the fact that both of them starred in movies based on Shakespeare's plays I feel is no coincidence. It's not just adaptations of works of literature he has been in though. Just like the series that came out a few years after this one (World War 2 in Color), this series chooses to forgo large levels of detail in favor of covering the most important aspects of the war instead. I already reviewed the much acclaimed ww1 series "The Great War" which aired on BBC in the mid 60s, when many veterans of the war were still alive. Right off the bat, that gives the BBC series an edge over this one, because it uses firsthand information. Believe it or not though, the series does actually have interviews with ww1 soldiers, but since it was made in 2003, they are all extremely old, and there aren't as many as on The Great War. While I wouldn't say this show is on par with that series in terms of quality, it still has several important innovations. It allows viewers to get a real look at how the first world war was depicted by human eyes, because typically, footage of it is in black and white. The colorization process they used is a little weird though, because it looks like they just took the mediocre quality footage from 1914-1918 and colored it without actually improving the quality itself. They probably couldn't improve it since the original film is so old. The show itself talks about why the first world war started and how alliances in Europe at the time in 1914 were the catalyst that set off an explosion of violence that would leave millions dead by 1918. In the very last episode, it mentions briefly how the defiant attitude in Germany came about because of the unfairness of the Versaille Treaty, and how a former ww1 soldier named Adolf Hitler exploited the people's rage and hatred for their defeat 15 years before. The show also features historians that give insight to certain world war 1 battles that largely determined the outcome of the war, which is appreciated, but at the same time, it's not quite as in depth as The Great War is. World War 1 in Color is still good, and Kenneth's narration is almost as good as Michael Redgrave's, but the show does not cover enough material comprehensively to be considered as good as the 60s series. That one went through basically all the places that saw action during the war. Still, it's a good overview of the conflict, and the disc I have includes a bonus episode on little known missions undertaken during the war, narrated by Robert Powell (who narrated ww2 in color and was in Jesus of Nazareth)

I've been watching a number of "colourised" historical documentaries and although I've noted that other reviewers have raised the issue of problems improving the detail of (now very old) monochrome film whilst colourising them, it's still a shame that the end result isn't as good as some other productions.

What REALLY lets this down, however, is the constant reference to "England" when "Britain" should be used - it's a common error for Americans to think that "England = Britain" (it doesn't!) but it's unforgivable for references to be made to "England" when even the maps being displayed clearly display "United Kingdom". If this series was to be believed, Scotland and Wales didn't play any part in WW1 (Northern Ireland didn't become part of the UK until 1920).

Everything unknown is taken for magnificent...

Since we have so little to compare the visuals to... whereas the narrative....

If you wish to find a documentary that speaks of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, the boys in World War I, and of confusion, passion, evil --

This is not it.....

A war without politics!! Without Junker greed! Without rape nor rotting Doughboys in the trenches... the Clean war in color... flying things and heavy iron rolling in color....

However, it's a great way to copyright public domain footage.

The Latins had a phrase for this "omne ignotum pro magnifico: Everything unknown is taken for magnificent.. and for the first time color is added to World War I -- magnificent try!

Someday I'd like to license some of the footage for my own version of the war... maybe not a commercial as producer Martin's "Greatest SAS Missions" (2004) (mini) TV Series (producer)but certainly more of the reason the French and English dreaded the subject.... The Great War...

Great idea to reach authentic reality, overcoming technical limitations of the time. The only (subjective) beef: when my attention concentrated on the colour, I couldn't care less about the suffering, the corpses in a ditch, the blood. It just becomes a colorful landscape, which sorta negates the purpose. If I concentrated on the story, I completely forgot about the coloring they made (which killed their work) and wanted better story coverage (which is pretty sketchy). And - the 'accents'. If it had been all brit, whatever, I'd loved it. The 'accents' spoiled it beyond repair. Instead of a true story - another puppet theatre. I an profoundly sorry.