War Horse

Everyone generally has certain types of movies they typically watch and others they typically avoid. When I first heard of War Horse I instantly dismissed it as the type of thing I would normally avoid. It’s a movie about a horse. I internally thought about the old Babe movies about a pig. Hence my desire to avoid War Horse. However, there was that nagging thought that this was directed by Steven Spielberg and I eventually caved and decided to go watch it.

War Horse is definitely the best movie based on an animal I’ve seen. It tells a wonderful story and does a great job getting you behind to route for the horse and various characters. It was also an interesting angle to view World War I as you see a lot of it from a logistics side.

I think the biggest problem with War Horse was some identity confusion. Much of the movie seemed to be designed as a family friendly film. Strong examples of this are the scenes where much effort is used to purposefully mask death. This is often done by cutting away right before someone is killed, then showing their horse riding on with no one riding it. There is nothing wrong with this as filmmakers can choose whatever they want their target audience to be.

What makes it kind of bizarre is that sometimes the exact opposite approach is taken and you definitely see why the movie earned a PG-13 rating. The best example of this is with the 2 German boys who desert from the military and are subsequently caught. So, cue the sad realities of desertion and fade away to the next stewards of the horse, or not. Instead, as soon as the kids are caught, they are lined up and executed by a firing squad. This scene was hugely shocking. Part of it had to do with the fact that death had been shielded so much previously in the film and part of it had to do with the fact that it was a young boy being executed. It just seemed so wild and it didn’t fit with the rest of the movie at all.

The very end of the movie was also kind of strange in that it seemed almost amateurish. At the very end when Albert is coming back home with the horse everything is strangely red in color. I think they were trying to go for a sunset type of look but it was so obviously fake and just looked terrible. I have no idea how Steven Spielberg thought that looked good.

War Horse is definitely a good movie, its just difficult to figure out exactly where it fits. It is definitely not for little kids, but so much of it seemed to be designed with little kids in mind. Aside from those shortcomings, you will probably enjoy the film. It’s not the type of movie you’d want to see every week but you will appreciate the quality filmmaking.