This film completely passed me by when it was on in the cinema, which is a bit of a shame really. The month it was out, I went see Sherlock Holmes 2 (brilliant fun), and Haywire (immensely disappointing), and didn't even notice War Horse until the oscar nominations were released. But given that I was a huge Black Beauty fan as a kid, I was glad of the eventual opportunity to watch it.
War Horse, is, uh... about a horse. In the war (first world, to be precise). A farmer in devon buys a rather beautiful unbroken thoroughbred colt when he was supposed to buy a workhorse, and his son falls in love with the animal, names him Joey, and trains him up for riding and ploughing. There's a rather endearing horse-training montage. But then the harvest fails, and the war comes, and the farmer has to sell the horse to get enough money to make his rent. The story then follows the horse across Europe during the war, and follows the boy as he too goes to war.
A film about a horse is generally problematic, because you have to anthropomorphize the horse enough to make it a watchable main character, while not making it so humaized so as to be unbelievable. In this, I think War Horse does a lot better than Black Beauty ever did, if only because it didn't have the irritating narration over the top. This film proved that you can get a horse to fill the screen without trying to give it a voice, which I liked. In the course of the story, the very well-trained horse demonstrates just a little too much self-awareness, and it's a little twee in places, but I kind of expected that, and they didn't overdo it, which was a real risk. I would say that horse films are never quite the same when you know any horse body-language; the image of a horse running in terror doesn't have quite the same impact when you see how happy and alert he looks.
The story also manages to get across some of the horror of war, albeit from a horse's perspective for much of it, and a slightly sanitized version from the boy's.
As is probably inevitable in a story of this nature, the human characters get slightly short-changed, but some of them do manage to shine through. The main character, Albert (Jeremy Irvine) gives a spirited and cute performance, but his character is a little overly fanciful for my taste, and while I appreciate his fanciful nature, it seems like he's always a little removed from the events he's taking part in. The supporting cast, however, are almost without exception brilliant, from the farmer and his wife (Peter Mullen and Emily Watson), to the cavalry Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) and Major Stewart (Benedict Cumberbatch) who occupy a short, but very stirring section at the beginning of the war. Each of them brings a very different character to life for their segment, and makes Joey's journey more believable as they drift through the story.
I suppose my major criticism of the film was the lack of the feeling of the passage of time. The prologue covers the three or four years as the horse grows from a foal to a saleable colt, which is fine. The rest of the film covers a similar length of time (the span of the war), but there wasn't really a sense of how long Joey spends in each of his stopovers; did he spend a year in the English cavalry before being captured by the Germans to haul an ambulance cart, or a month? Was he on a farm in France for two months, or two years? The film makes it look like he spends barely a few days in each scenario, and then suddenly four years have passed.
But that's a small criticism. This was one of those genuinely good films that you can actually enjoy. The rare 'oscar material' piece that actually stands up as a good piece of fiction, rather than just an art piece for the benefit of film critics. But then, you'd expect Stephen Spielberg to do a good job.
I'll finish this review there, but I would like to mention briefly that this film does pretty well with its historically accurate female characters... but I think that's a blog for another time.
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