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)
