War Horse

This is a pretty special movie for me and I must say that I really enjoyed it. Spielberg filmed this in his own way and it ended up so that every scene looks like a poster. Some scenes stand out incredibly. The ride through the battlefield is the most powerful scene of the movie, thanks to John Williams’ music too. Sometimes maybe half of the good feeling from the movie comes from the somebody sitting next to you. (27/02/2012)

A nostalgic look back to the heartiest, most melodramatic stage of cinematography. Film poetry for people who remember those times, maybe the last of its kind. Had it been twenty minutes shorter, it would have been one of Steven Spielberg’s best movies. That it’s one of his most personal films can be felt from every scene. (25/02/2012)

Steven Spielberg in the saddle! Still. And this time, literally. He holds the reins tight and... All right, I'll drop the horse analogies. Unfortunately, with War Horse, it's as I thought it would be. Many viewers were probably expecting a war battle sequence with non-stop action, a camera dirty with mud and blood, piles of dead... And they didn't know that Spielberg was adapting a book for slightly older children. So this is absolutely (in the best sense of the word) an ideal substance for him. He brought it to the screen with everything he had, and if the film deviates from Morpurgo's text, it's only for the best (the book, for example, is written in the first person and narrated by a horse, which also means that we don't see any battle scenes like the incredibly gripping trench battle Albert experiences in the film). That the Dartmoor scenes are pastel and kitsch to the point of shame? Yet their contrast with the war scenes stands out all the more. That Albert and Joey's intimate relationship makes anyone laugh? Haven't you ever had an animal and talked to them for hours? Isn't what many people call "zoophilia light" called friendship? And that's what War Horse is all about. It's an ode to friendship. The friendship of people with people, people with horses and horses with horses. When one sees how soldiers in different uniforms take care of horses with exactly the same love, one cannot even mind that the English, Germans and French do not speak their own languages, but English to a man... After all, they are all the same people, pitted against each other by a few powerful bastards who one morning wanted to start a war. There are a number of powerful and memorable scenes in the film (both the "light-hearted" ones, such as the ploughing or the car race, and the "warlike" ones, especially the cavalry charge, the windmill and the top sequence with the horse running through the raging "no-man's land" and culminating in the cutting of the wires) and I had no choice but to watch them contentedly, listen to the divine John Williams as I like him best, be moved now and then and clap my hands in spirit. I didn't know the runtime beforehand, but I honestly wouldn't have guessed that the whole adventure lasted 150 minutes. It passed so quickly and was so beautifully warm in the end. (02/03/2012)

A much more unbearable film than I could have ever expected. Technically speaking, it’s good, of course, but the dialogues are a pain to listen to, the main characters are unlikeable (all of them, and the main teenage redneck most of all), the story is driven by either chance or the stupidity of the characters, and the whole lot is so awfully pathetic and kitsch that it made my head spin. I think the world around us is full of better stories and I don’t understand why anyone should care whether one mare will be reunited with an unlikeable young guy or not. And, if the animal in this film intentionally and consciously (!!!) sacrifices itself in order to help its friend, and people actually believe it and are moved by it… something is bloody wrong in this world. It’s been long since something pissed me off so much. Two stars for the technical aspect, but unfortunately, Spielberg is no longer guarantee of quality mainstream entertainment. (13/01/2012)

A film about love, goodness and horses, in which the Great War also looks many times more pathetic and moralistic than in all of the anti-war pamphlets of the 1920s and 1930s. Paradoxically, this is not a problem at all - the main drawback of this captivating spectacle is Spielberg's absolute fondness for the surface. Everything inner and psychological disappears from the shots - everything is taken over by a rich visual arrangement. People and horses are explicitly props in the creator's professorial exhibition. Moments of emotion always and again come across the same thing - it's not the human (horse) story that impresses us, it's rather the respectable audiovisual construction, under which (unlike Steven's famous films) there is nothing at all, just a genre vacuum. This is simply not enough for a fairy tale, which War Horse is more than anything else. (20/02/2012)