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I'm beginning to worry about Spielberg.
War Horse opens in the bucolic Devonshire countryside, where a struggling alcoholic (but essentially decent) farmer buys a thoroughbred horse, to the delight of his son and the despair of his wife. The horse is unsuited to farm work, but due to sheer determination, intelligence and unusual stamina the horse manages to turn its hooves to the taxing busingess of ploughing fields. But then war comes, and the horse must be sold to the British army to help in the fight against the Hun. Where will the winds of war blow our friend with his white socks and crest?
War Horse is the eggiest pudding ever to be set in front of a cinema audience. It is so over egged, that were Spielberg a baker he wouldn't have balked even at a basket of Ostrich eggs and would indeed have tossed in a few oversized ones from the Jurassic Park genetics lab. Almost every single shot in the film is striving towards some sort of poetic beauty, but so overused are the sunrises and sunsets, dawn mists and drifting snow, that they eventually become horribly improbable. Indeed, some look a little too digitally tinkered. Now this is just the backdrop admittedly, but it points towards how badly the film goes astray in every other department as well. The script by Richard Curtis is resolutely unsubtle and irritatingly bland in its characterisation. People are either salt of the earth common folk, eyebrow raised ignorant and callous upper class or... well, that's it really. The script gets the job done, it's not an inherently bad one, but it proves itself utterly devoid of interest. There's no dialogue that sets anyone out against anybody else. And it's so bloody full of lessons as well. Everyone's always earnestly trying to impart something poetic and elevating to somebody else. You may think that such a thing is fair enough in a family war film, but it does grind you down. It's a continuous, "AH! Do you see? But AHHHH!"
Another gloopy egg cracked open and dripped over the (digital) celuoid is the relentless score by John Williams, as mechanical and inhuman and endless as the war itself. It's the same refrain, repeated over and over and over. Imagine Adele's 'Chasing Pavements' song, for three hours. Exactly. It stuck in my head for two nights running, feverishly repeating. Cheers, Williams.
There's a curious lack of genuine emotion as well. It's strange but it's hard to actually care too much about the horse. There's an attempt to make us hate a German officer who shoots them down when they've become too tired to pull the heavy guns, but that's what war is. It's the system he's part of, and the English system was remarkably similar. Before trucks came along, something had to pull those artillery pieces. The film tries to show us the horror of war, including a genuinely gripping Somme battle sequence, but leaves no lasting impression as there's a dearth of emotional intent behind it. There's no real anger or despair or hope. It's just showing some narrative stuff in an interminable film about a horse. For me, it's the most baffling cinematic experience I've ever had. There's bags of talent in the making of it and yet there doesn't seem to be any soul.
There's the odd good bit. The scene involving a Krupp field gun being dragged to the top of a hill is a sort of equine Saldego vision from hell. The story about the two young German brothers is touching and genuinely sad, if even they should have predicted the ending. The announcement of war is well done, as are the scenes involving Cumberbatch as an English cavalry officer. But too often Spielberg resorts to a cinematic grab-bag of expoitative techniques. You could tell what shots were coming, and what beats were going to be hit before they came.
Symptomatic of the entire folly are the opening Devonshire scenes. The film attempts to lay a foundation for the subsequent horrific oddyssey by evoking a lost English rural idyll and the struggle of peacetime farmers. What in practice plays out is a schmaltzier version of Babe, with even an angry goose to provide panto laughs as it chases of the mean landlord and his friends. This is a film that has absolutely no idea of striving for a consistent artistic vision. It just seems content to try and slap a story on a big screen.
Anything good about it then? Well, the talent does show, all the same. It looks impressive. Spielberg's regular foil Janusz Kaminski does his usual excellent work, but again this is undermined by the relentless demand for beauty shots. It's not a BAD film either, there are scenes that work well. It's just utterly ho-hum.
All in all, a treacly, over-egged, over long movie with gripping brutal war bits that ultimately don't seem to matter so much in the general inertialess, cloying mass.
2.5/5
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