A sense of calmness takes over as Gallipoli - The Scale of Our War beckons visitors to the second floor of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
It doesn't matter what your views on war - a remembrance or glorification of the loss of lives - the impact is undeniable.
You find yourself showing the courtesy often accorded to a monastery that has taken a vow of silence or tip-toeing and conversing in hushed tones appropriate to a hospital recovery ward.
The 90-minute visual and emotional journey through the orchestrated maze of the Te Papa and Weta Workshop collaboration is frankly mesmerising.
I was in the capital city for two days at the invitation of Positively Wellington Tourism to create some interest for football lovers as Argentina, Ghana and Panama rolled into town for the Fifa Under-20 World Cup.
The 45-minute tour of the Weta Cave workshop in the suburb of Miramar in the morning was merely the entree to the main course of the war exhibition.
The 2.4 times larger-than-life-sized sculptures offer breathtaking imagery at each turn of the six dioramas.
Lieutenant Spencer Westmacott, in full cry and arm extended with a pistol after a bullet smashes his right arm, gets the ball rolling in The Great Adventure.
You find out the right arm of the Christchurch-born soldier was amputated in Egypt but he continued painting military scenes using his left hand after the war.
You turn to Order from Chaos next, to find English-born surgeon Percival Fenwick attending to a wounded soldier on a mound of rubble.
The lieutenant-colonel treated scores of Anzacs on the "hellish" beach.
Sick and evacuated after two months, Fenwick eventually returned to Christchurch Hospital in the 1920s where he pioneered the use of radium and radiotherapy.
Stalemate definitely strikes a chord with me. It is Private John Robert Dunn, a 25-year-old journalist in Masterton when he enlisted with his brother in August 1914 to serve in the Wellington Infantry Battalion.
After four months of service at Gallipoli the following year, he was evacuated with pneumonia but returned to duty unwell.
Court martialed and sentenced to death for sleeping on duty, "Jack" Dunn did jail time but died on returning to duty in the attack on Chunuk Bair.
Enter Chunuk Bair and the Maori Contingent, including Hastings-born Corporal Friday Patrick Hawkins (Ngati Kahungunu), are defiantly manning the machine gun while Australian-born engineer Colin Warden, a crack sniper and machine gunner, lies slumped over a mountain of jute sacks.
Hawkins, who returned to New Zealand to undergo training at Dannevirke and Linton after transferring to the Air Force in the 1940s, had taken over as No1 gunner in Chunuk Bair when the corporal manning the gun was shot dead.
The Bay soldier died in Auckland in 1968.
Saying Goodbye certainly tugs at the heartstrings: it depicts Auckland nurse Lottie Le Gallais, who joined up to be near her enlisted brother, Leddra (Leddie).
Tragically, her letters to Leddie came back starkly stamped "reported killed" four months after his death (family at home had been notified).
You can't help but share the pain etched on the face of the Auckland nurse, reading the letter informing her of her brother's death.
The exhibition ends with Western Front, profiling Sergeant Cecil Malthus of Timaru, a teacher who returned to become a language professor and wrote two books on his war experiences.
The genius of Weta wallahs comes to the fore in every sculpture - the attention to detail is gobsmacking.
The blond body hair, blue-green veins, glistening sweat ... it all brings the soldiers to life even in death.
Body and head hair is human.
The facial one is a mix of human, goat and yak on the fibreglass structures with silicone used to form exposed skin.
The 90kg to 150kg figures were hand-painted with every pore on the skin hand-sculpted and hair manually punched in.
Consequently, it's not hard to digest that it took more than 24,000 labour hours to build and install the $8 million exhibition.
A $3.6 million Lottery Grants Board injection means it's free for the public to view.
The intangible experience of viewers is priceless.
The other Bay connection is the last living survivor from World War I, Torty, the 120-year-old tortoise that came back on a troop ship in 1916 from Gallipoli.
Kiwi stretcher bearer Stewart Little brought the Greek land creature to Dunedin after a French gun carriage ran over her.
She now lives with Stewart's daughter-in-law Beth Little at Mary Doyle Retirement home in Havelock North, wrapped up and hibernating from April to August in an apple carton.
The queues are long and I was lucky to have museum senior communications adviser Rachael Bruce give me a one-on-one whirlwind tour but it's worth persevering with.
Bruce says the exhibition will be around for four years, but I reckon it'll comfortably push that deadline.
The cafe and restaurant culture and the usual trappings of a cosmopolitan city can become a seductive allure but only a riveting exhibition of this nature can feed one's soul.
Football fanatic or not.
