Review of War Horse (2011) by Jollyg87 — 26 Dec 2011

Spielberg has always been a master manipulator. He knows just what to do to make a scene feel like it's one for the ages. But in most of his films, he's always had a group of characters we can get behind or a story that is like nothing we've seen before.

In other words, he delivers the goods before trying to control our emotions. In "War Horse," I didn't feel like the goods were delivered, leaving me fully aware of Spielberg's attempted manipulation.

It was like watching a magician perform a trick I already knew how to do. While the cinematography is beautiful, and the story stays engaging as we follow the horse through multiple battlefields, very few characters have much meat to them, especially Albert who's the boy that raises the horse.

All we understand from Albert is that he is a determined boy who loves his horse. That's about it. He's like Captain America where he is the epitome of good. And like Captain America, when you have a consistently "good" character, it becomes quite easy to guess what the character's actions will be.

He's a character that's easy to figure out early on, and nothing is done to give him any depth whatsoever. Luckily, there are a few characters along the way that bring the movie back up. My favorite group consisted of a French young teen and her grandfather.

The young teen is played by Celine Buckens and she is the standout of the film with only 15 minutes of screen time. She, along with Niels Arestrup who plays the grandfather, are the only actors able to breathe life into their characters.

After the horse leaves their company, I have to admit I was pretty disappointed, as the horse never encounters any characters of interest for the remainder of the movie. Also, in terms of the plot twists, I kept getting this feeling that Spielberg was in this world pulling the strings to make everything turn out okay.

Whenever tragedy threatened, there was almost always some character acting illogically or an implausible event that brought it back around. Because Spielberg does this early on, I came to realize that everything would work out okay for the main characters, and nothing unexpectedly drastic would happen.

This took the fun out of the movie a bit, and it made me just wait patiently for the inevitable ending. Now as I'm looking over what I've written so far, it does seem like I'm trashing "War Horse," which is not what I intended.

I enjoyed the movie well enough. "War Horse" definitely is one of the most beautifully filmed movies of Spielberg's career, and while the script doesn't offer much depth, Spielberg moves the film along at a nice enough pace to keep us constantly engaged for over two hours.

That's a feat few directors can do, and Spielberg handles it like a champ. Overall, I'd recommend this to people looking for a predictably happy ending, but for the rest of you, I'd wait till it comes out on DVD before checking it out.