Review No.7: War Horse

For the first trip to my favourite independent cinema, Light House in Wolverhampton, me and my cinema-going companion decided to see Steven Spielberg's War Horse. The film starts off in the early 20th century when Peter Mullan's stubborn farmer sees something in a splendid horse and spends over the odds on it just to spite his lanlord. His son Albie then becomes attached to the horse he names Joey however due to trouble at the farm his father sells him to the army at the start of World War I and it is only then that the film really gets going. War Horse then becomes a road movie around the battleground of 1914-1918 France as Joey is renamed several times and comes into contact with a lot of different characters including plummy British officers, underage German soldiers, Thomas Buch from The Killing and a scenery-chewing Rutger Hauer. Obviously the film rockets, or perhaps gallops, to an inevitable ending where a now of age Albie goes to war in search of his beloved equine companion.

War Horse is certainly an improvement on Spielberg's last two films, the fourth Indiana Jones disaster and the unintentionally hilarious Tintin, and actually has some spectacular sequences. But for its first fourty minutes it is incredibly slow mainly due to a plethora of expositional dialogue and far too many ploughing montages with the only upside in these early scenes being the pairing of the excellent Emily Watson and Peter Mullan. When war is finally declared we get the better part of the film and the lion's share of the action as Joey's plight briefly brings together soldiers from both parts of the war. It is hard to single out one member of this cast as the stand-out as a lot of the time we have actors appearing for five minutes and leaving again including Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Marsan but for me Hauer does an excellent job and I enjoyed the scenes with him and his granddaughter living in a windmill. But this is definitely the horse's story and the animal actors definitely outshine their human counterparts. I'm definitely glad I saw War Horse as it was well-shot with great scenery and for the most part great acting although Jeremy Irvine as Albie was always a little annoying. A good word to describe War Horse would be long-winded as I felt it took well over two hours to tell a story that could've been condensed to just over 90 minutes.

Verdict: A well made family film with some memorable moments but one that drags far too much so far that reason I will give it 7.5/10