Max's Review

“War Horse” can be insufferable. Based on the eponymous children’s book by Michael Morpurgo, Steven Spielberg’s film is a mess of schmaltzy, melodramatic tropes. John Williams’s lush orchestration yanks at the viewer’s heartstrings. And whenever the film moves to the English countryside, the brilliant cinematographer Janusz Kaminski — a frequent Spielberg collaborator — defaults to a “Gone With the Wind” look: imagine silhouetted figures placed against an achingly gorgeous blood-red sunset.

“War Horse” is extremely earnest about its schmaltziness, and about the naiveté of the horse and the boy at the heart of its story. It is this very earnestness that makes the film memorable, even if it is a failure. It opens with Albert Narracott (played by newcomer Jeremy Irvine) crouching behind a fence and fixing his gleaming eyes on the sight of the future War Horse being born on a field. The boy’s titillating fixation is mildly disconcerting, although this is as far as the film hews to the birds and the bees. From that moment on, their bond is sealed.

As their relationship deepens over the next 45 minutes, it is difficult, while sitting through each of those minutes, to understand what Spielberg was going for. The tone is so saccharine, the colors of the English countryside so saturated, that at first, “War Horse” seems to be parodying the typical boy-and-[insert animal] story. But Spielberg remains quite serious about sticking with this sickeningly beautiful pre-war setting. Just when the viewer begins to lose all hope, Europe erupts in war, and the horse is thankfully sold by the boy’s father to the British Army.

This is where things get interesting. No one can match Spielberg when it comes to filming battle scenes, and it was not until watching this film that I came to fully understand how traumatic World War One was. It wasn’t just a futile bloodbath that destroyed a generation of Europeans; it was the destruction of a previous way of life.

The War Horse represents nature and the previous way of life; the tanks, machine guns and tear gas represent total annihilation by mechanized warfare. These are shamelessly obvious metaphors that Spielberg, to his credit, does not shy away from. The two most memorable scenes in “War Horse” concern this traumatic struggle between the past and future.

In the film’s first battle, a line of British calvary charge at a German camp and seem to be winning — until they reach a line of hidden machine gun encampments. A clever wide shot shows dozens of horses, sans their riders, leaping over the steaming, still-firing machine guns. It strikes me as the one truly brilliant Spielberg moment in the film, an ingenious depiction of the charge’s futility that doesn’t exploit its violent failure.

Spielberg is less convincing and less subtle when he attempts to find a common, primordial bond that unites soldiers from warring countries. Take the initially stunning sequence in which the War Horse breaks free and thunders through No Man’s Land, forging a path through the barricades and barbed wire. When a roll of wire finally downs him, a sympathetic English soldier and a sympathetic German soldier hesitantly step out of their respective trenches and reach the horse, armed with wire clippers. “You speak good English,” notes the English soldier. The German soldier gently corrects him: “I speak English well.”

Sadly, the moment is somewhat neutered by the fact that all of the characters, whether English, German or French, have been speaking English throughout the film’s entirety. This is a bizarre oversight, considering how effectively Spielberg used the discrepancy of language in “Saving Private Ryan.”

In any case, no matter how much those two soldiers talk, there is no image quite as powerful or telling as a horse charging a line of barbed wire or machine guns. Hidden beneath this melodrama of a naive boy and his horse is the haunting story of a modernizing world undergoing a violent adjustment period. It is true that viewers need a sense of that seemingly perfect pre-war environment, to contrast with the brutal battles they witness later on. But with an antebellum society as saccharine and corny as “War Horse”’s, it is impossible to take that underlying, larger struggle as seriously as it deserves to be.