No one would doubt Steven Spielberg's credentials on the antiwar front. The famous opening D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan is every bit as brutal and awful as its reputation and it would be impossible for him to top it with the remainder of the movie (and he doesn't).
For all that Private Ryan shows the bloody consequences of young men on both sides of a conflict being chewed up and spat out by war as realistically as the medium of film will allow, War Horse manages a similar feat with more symbolic methods set during an earlier World War. After a disastrous cavalry charge right into German machine guns, alternating shots show riders on horses being replaced by riderless horses dashing past the guns. The effect is about the same.
Based on the stage play, War Horse shows the horrors of war through the eyes of a complete innocent, the title character, a horse named Joey. Early in the movie, we see Joey's birth and training under the watchful eye of a kid named Albert Narracott. Albert's parents are poor farmers behind in the rent, so Joey is sold to a cavalry officer and sent off to war. Once there, the horse changes hands and sides multiple times, witness to the horrors that happen, both in and out of combat. No one the horse encounters is free of the war, and Spielberg manages to show the piles of bodies, both human and equine, whenever he really needs to, but neglects to show much of the actual violence that kills man or animal. The revolving sails of a windmill, for example, cover up the execution of some deserters quite effectively.
If anything, Spielberg does a better job this time around in keeping both sides of the conflict morally similar than he did in Private Ryan. German soldiers, as well as British ones, are just as likely to be portrayed positively, something Private Ryan's climax fails to do. Also gone is the dehumanization process of Private Ryan, however, given how much Joey's presence seems to bring out the best in most people he encounters. One effective scene shows a British and German soldier working together to free Joey from a tangle of barbed wire.
While generally I'd say something about the acting in most movies I discuss, War Horse puts me in an odd position. None of the humans are bad. In point of fact, all of them do an effective job, and few are what might be classified as name actors. I was curious to see how well Tom Hiddleston did when he wasn't being smacked around by a large Aussie with a big hammer, and as the cavalry officer who first buys Joey, he does very well. And for some reason, I can't escape Benedict Cumberbatch, who I saw not 24 hours earlier in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and appears here as another cavalry officer. The biggest name in the cast is probably David Thewlis, best known for the Harry Potter series, and I had a bad case of "I know who that is! Where have I seen him before?" for Liam Cunningham as an army surgeon before looking him up and seeing he is Davos Seaworth on HBO's Game of Thrones.
But the real stars, besides Spielberg's ability to craft a story, were the horses. Animal actors are almost certainly hard to get a good performance out of. They don't have human emotional ranges and they can only be trained but so much. And yet, the various horses, maybe by simply being there and looking in the right direction, alongside Spielberg's ability to get the right shot at the right moment, creates the illusion, which is all film is anyway.
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