Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, War Horse is a heartfelt tale of a horse's journey through World War I. A unique telling of the terrible atrocities soldiers and horses had to face in The Great War.
The horse in question, named Joey is owned by Albert Narracott who takes care of him and teaches the horse to plow as Albert’s father Ted bought him in a horse auction trying to outbid his land owner Lyons (played by David Thewlis). His wife, Rose is distraught as Ted spent all the rent money on a thoroughbred horse instead of a plow horse and now they don't have any money nor do they have a plow horse. This in turn leads Ted to sell the horse to the army once World War 1 breaks out and thus begins Joey's journey.
Spielberg has a good track record with War films, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List are two of the most moving pieces of cinema I have ever watched. Here the hero is a horse and through this horse we get to experience not only what the British troops are going through but the Germans and even the French experience. Joey affects the lives of all that he comes into contact with and this all comes to ahead when he races through No Mans Land, a place where humans and most especially horses rarely come out alive, and gets tangled in barbed wire. Here two soldiers of opposing sides, English and German, come together to untangle the horse and call a temporary truce showing just how much animals can bring people together.
What Spielberg shows us is that horses were a huge part of this war, they were helpless victims who were brought into war to serve a purpose - as one solider explains horses must either be used as a weapon or destroyed. They did not choose to serve us in the war but had no choice, they were pulled in by man. The film is overall, quite moving. At every turn you find yourself bracing for the worst, expecting at any moment Joeys adventure to be over and letting out a sigh of relief when he maneuvers his way out.
Apart from Joey, Jeremy Irvine is very sympathetic as young Albert, he can at times be a bit saccharine sweet for the average viewer but like the story itself, he is earnest and unapologetic. Emily Watson is strong as is her onscreen husband Peter Mullan however they all take a back seat to Joey. Its Joey who leads the narrative and directs the audience through the atrocities that happened in World War 1.
Spielberg’s film is rich with colour and his canvas is sublime, the ending is uplifting and satisfying. The lush setting of a man on his horse with an orange sky as the background, coming home after years of War is reminiscence of a John Wayne movie. He embraces his mother and father and the audience is left feeling content. Joey survived. This is of course, a lucky hand he was dealt. A lot of fortunate coincidences helped him, but really this movie needed it to move the plot along otherwise Joey would have just been stuck going from one camp to the next. The movie is bold in its sentiment and the characters well developed but some of the brutalities of war were not always shown and at times you felt like there needed to be more, there needed to be more punch to the storyline as it felt that sometimes we were only on the tips of the War, we were on the edges but never in the centre.
