War Horse (**)
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan,
Niels Arestrup, David Thewliss, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Celine
Buckens, Toby Kebbell, Eddie Marsan
Seen: March 1st 2012
** Out of ****
I am baffled by War Horse. I am baffled by its
nomination for a Best Picture Academy Award. I am baffled by Steven Spielberg
directing it. And most of all I am baffled by its near universal good word of
mouth. War Horse is at least 45 minutes longer than it should have been, and
the entire movie feels like it was written by junior high school students in
segments intended for Saturday morning cartoons in some eastern bloc country. I
constantly expected the horses to start talking, and I had a strong feeling
that even though what I was seeing on screen was real-life, it was an animated
movie.
Albert (Irvine) lives on a farm near Devon, England
with his somewhat alcoholic father Ted (Mullan) and his tough but forgiving
mother Rose (Watson). Albert witnesses the birth of a thoroughbred foal and
with growing admiration watches this young horse growing up by its mother’s
side. Ted, possibly not completely present, buys the horse at a local auction
for an exorbitant price, the bid chased up by none other than his own
cartoonishly evil landlord, Lyons (Thewliss). This brings them financial
troubles as Lyons threatens to take their land away. Albert grows incredibly
close to the horse, who he names Joey, training him and getting him to work on
the daunting task of ploughing a very rocky field so they can attempt to make
enough money to not be kicked off their (rented) land. In a desperate attempt
to survive, Ted sells the horse to the army when World War I starts, and when
Albert comes pleading for Joey, Captain Nicholls (Hiddleston), agrees that the
purchase will be a lease agreement with Albert for the duration of the war, and
Joey will be returned to him.
This sends Joey on a near-unbelievable journey, where
he changes ownership about as often as an old student Volkswagen as his
stewards are killed in action, executed, robbed, or chased away. From the
poster you know how the movie will end, and when Albert is revealed to be part
of the war effort any doubts you may have had about this conclusion disappear
like Keyser Soze into an ending that could have benefited greatly from rather
being filmed through Instagram filters.
I did not like War Horse, I thought it was boring and
had way too many small but forced plot points. I not only feared that the
horses would start talking, but that they’d start singing, as the opening
scenes of the movie in the rolling hills of England very strongly invoked, at
least in my mind’s eye, The Sound of Music. This movie might have been a
classic by now had it been made in 1935, but storytelling has evolved over the
last 75 years (even though it isn’t always evident from the majority of movies
we see nowadays) – War Horse simply does not fit its time period.
If you love horses I cannot say for sure you’ll
appreciate War Horse, as many horses are killed and tortured during the movie
(the English alone lost a million horses in World War I), with one horse
surviving the movie, barely. While the war sequences are well-filmed, to me War
Horse was two and a half hours of wondering what the point could possibly be.
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