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. (28/02/2012)

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)

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. (03/03/2012)

This is going against the flow a little, but my problem with Warhorse isn’t that it’s a “chintzy Hollywood Spielbergesque tearjerker", but that in the end it isn’t like that at all. But that’s what it’s trying to be; too much, in fact; it is made like that but in its core it lacks the foundation to all movies like this - emotions. The bond between Albert and Joey is so slap-dash; it is ground up into mini-stories that blend into one; in the end I didn’t give a damn about either of them or about the movie either. And the movie should either have been much shorter (and just about those two) or should have been a regular mini-series, where each episode could tell one of the ten-minute escapades we see here. (15/01/2012)

Spielberg did what Cameron did years ago when he was filming Titanic, War Horse is not a groundbreaking in terms of plot, it’s a rather classic story, but Steven indirectly winks at us and suggests that this is how the true blockbuster films of the silver screen used to be made, with real emotions that are not often seen nowadays. The film aesthetics, the camera work, the lighting, etc. are also not standard that I would call them old-school. Therefore, it is a tribute to the old school. Whether it works in the end, everyone has to decide for themselves. For seasoned film enthusiasts, fans of the work of an eternal child, and the older population, War Horse will be a nostalgic escape from everyday reality. For the rest, it will probably just be a tedious bore, which half will consider as pathetic. Spielberg filmed what he wanted and did it very well. The scene with the horse against barbed wire is gripping. (26/03/2012)