War Horse (2011, PG-13)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Grade: B

Yes, War Horse can be overly sappy, and yes, it has those same imperfections that inhabit Spielberg's other productions.   I would have preferred something that drove for a more imaginative take on the horse-man friendship story.  Many scenes tend to lean towards over dramatization for a proverbial heart-warming effect.  Yet, War Horse is also scrumptiously made, and the film’s style is distinctively Spielbergian.  As a result, War Horse is a conventional film, but also a technical success, as well as a general crowd-pleaser. 

The opening and closing scenes exhibit pleasant camera work shots of the English countryside.  However, the story opens to a slow start, as it must go through the process of the young English lad bonding with his newfound friend (the horse, named Joey).  Things start picking up once World War I begins in 1914, however.  Joey is shipped off to European battlefields, while Albert, too young for duty in the British army, must remain home in England.  Joey goes through several owners, namely a British Captain, two young German deserters, a young French girl and into the hands of German military service.  By 1918, Albert and his buddy have joined into service, taking part in the 2^nd Battle of the Somme.  Clearly, we should anticipate that Albert and Joey are destined to be reunited again, sooner or later, one way or another.

War Horse finds achievement in that Spielberg creates an intense World War I atmosphere.  Many of Spielberg’s previous pictures have concerned topics concerning the Second World War, and so a World War I environment is significantly new territory.  The battle scenes, marginally kept to a PG-13 level, reverberate back to the days of Saving Private Ryan, but what’s more shocking (on a good echelon) is that this is probably the second time in cinema the revulsions of World War I are effortlessly portrayed (the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front was the first).  There is one sequence in War Horse, in which hundreds of British soldiers charge across No Man’s Land—a shattered, deceased place—against a German trench.  Perhaps a dozen or two make it across (the rest lie either still or twitching on the mud), only to get wiped out by a lethal German counter gas-attack. 

There isn’t a lot to distinguish War Horse from the Black Stallion or Black Beauty set in a war zone.  However, the story rings in a correct manner, the individual characters are all well-developed, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s camerawork is in top form, and the story arc is mostly coherent.  War Horse is still on another end of the field from being a work of brilliance, but it’s a movie that also serves as a prompt for the fact that the theaters still play films that are worthy of paying your time and money to see.  B