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| War Horse (2011) () |
IMDB Rating: 7.3
Released: Dec 25, 2011
Rating: PG-13
Genres:
Drama, War,
Sub Genres:
Running Time: 146 minutes
AKA: Caballo de guerra
Country: USA
Language: English, German
IMDB Link: War Horse on IMDB
Official Site: Official Site
Views: 1,176
Plot: In Devon, England, Albert Narracott admires a young thoroughbred foal. Much to his mother Rose's dismay, Albert's father, Ted, buys the colt at auction, though he was intending to buy a plough horse for his farm. The purchase is also to spite his landlord, Lyons, who tried to outbid him for the colt. Albert names the horse Joey and devotes much time to training him. Albert's best friend, Andrew Easton, watches as Albert teaches his colt many things, such as to come when he whistles.
Ted, who has a bad leg and is an alcoholic, has fallen behind on the rent. He promises to pay Lyons after the family sells its turnip crop. Rose shows Albert his father's medals from the Second Boer War in South Africa, where Ted served with the Imperial Yeomanry. Ted was severely wounded in action, and received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery under fire. She gives Albert his father's regimental pennant, telling Albert that his father is not proud of what he did during the war, and that he had thrown the flag and medals away, though Rose saved and kept them hidden. Albert trains Joey for the plough and, to his neighbours' astonishment, prepares a stony hillside field to plant with turnips. But a rainstorm destroys the turnip field and, to pay the overdue rent (and without telling Albert), Ted sells Joey to Captain Nicholls as World War I breaks out. When Albert finds out, Nicholls promises he will take care of Joey and hopefully return him after the war. Albert tries to enlist in the army, but is too young. Before the captain leaves with Joey, Albert ties his father's pennant to Joey's bridle.
Joey is trained for military operations and deployed to France with Captain Nicholls. In France, Captain Nicholls is killed in a cavalry charge, and the Germans capture the horses. Joey becomes attached to Topthorn, a larger black horse he had military training with. The two horses are used to pull an ambulance wagon driven by two German soldiers, Gunther, and his 14-year-old brother, Michael. Gunther gives the pennant to Michael when he is assigned to the German front, but then steals the horses so he and his brother can ride them back to Germany. One night, German soldiers discover the absent without leave brothers hiding in a windmill and execute them by firing squad for desertion.
A young French girl named Emilie finds the two horses inside the windmill. Emilie, who suffers from an unspecified illness, lives with her grandfather, who owns the property. Later, German soldiers arrive and confiscate all food and supplies from the property. Emilie's grandfather allows her to ride Joey on her birthday, but when the German soldiers return, they take the horses, though the grandfather keeps the pennant.
The story shifts to Albert, who has now enlisted and is fighting alongside Andrew in the Second Battle of the Somme in 1918, under the command of Lyons's son, David. After a British charge into no-man's land, Albert, Andrew, and other British soldiers miraculously make it across into a deserted German trench, where gas bombs explode, filling the trench with white fumes.
Joey and Topthorn are now pulling German heavy artillery, causing Topthorn to die from exhaustion. Joey escapes and runs into no-man's land where he gets entangled in barbed wire. Both British and German soldiers spot Joey and try to coax him to their respective sides. A British Geordie soldier named Colin, waving a white flag, arrives at Joey's side. A German soldier named Peter from D?sseldorf also comes over with wire cutters, and together they free Joey from the barbed wire. They flip a coin to decide where Joey goes; Colin wins and takes Joey back to the British camp.
Andrew died in the gas attack, but Albert survived, though temporarily blinded, and has bandages covering his eyes. He is recuperating at a British medical camp when the Geordie soldier brings Joey in looking for a veterinary surgeon. Meanwhile, Albert is told about the miracle horse back from no-man's land. The army doctor instructs Sgt. Fry to put Joey down due to his injuries, but when Fry is about to shoot, a soft whistle catches Joey's attention. Albert is led through the crowd to Joey, again whistling, while Joey comes over to Albert.
Albert says that he raised Joey, and gives an exact description of his horse's markings, confirming his claim. The war ends and Albert's eyesight is restored, but only officers' horses will be shipped home. Joey and the others are to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The soldiers gather funds to buy Joey for Albert, but during a bidding war with a French butcher reaching 30 pounds, an older gentleman suddenly arrives and bids 100 pounds, winning Joey. The man is Emilie's grandfather. It is implied that Emilie has died, and after hearing about the miracle horse, her grandfather walked three days to get Joey back for the sake of Emilie's memory.
Albert pleads with Emilie's grandfather for the horse to no avail, but before leaving, the grandfather pulls out the pennant and asks if it means anything to Albert. On being told it belonged to Albert's father, the grandfather has a change of heart, and gives Albert the flag and Joey, saying it is what Emilie would have wanted. In the end, Albert rides Joey back to his family's farm and returns the pennant to his father.
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| War Horse Movie Review |
Source: Bill Wine
Article: t’s War Horse, an old-fashioned epic melodrama from director Steven Spielberg, who here targets all generations and all varieties of moviegoers, and sets his somber drama against the sweeping canvas of rural England and the nightmarish battlefields in France during the First World War.32 Movie Review: War Horse
Teenager Albert, played by Jeremy Irvine in his first film role, instantly bonds with Joey, the brown thoroughbred that his father (Peter Mullan) bids on at an auction even though he can’t really afford the horse, especially since Joey seems ill-equipped to pull a farm plough, as Albert’s mother (Emily Watson) is quick to point out.
Albert nurtures Joey as a pet and trains him to be the family’s workhorse, using him to help the family stave off financial ruin at the hands of their unsympathetic landlord (David Thewlis).
Th
is triggers a narrative that finds Joey becoming the property of a British cavalry officer and headed for the battlefields of France, while Albert, crushed, vows to find him and eventually bring him home. So Albert enlists and finds himself in the first of many trenches, always hoping he will somehow run into Joey and reunite with him.
Later, Joey ends up on a farm in France where he becomes the hidden property of a grandfather and granddaughter, after which he is captured by German soldiers, who use him to drag weaponry.
This is unmistakably Joey’s journey: he’s the catalyst. But it’s the array of human relationships that he affects that is the film’s ultimate footprint, with Joey serving as a reflection of the way two-legged characters treat each other.
With a screenplay by Richard Curtis that’s based on the 1982 children’s novel by Michael Murpurgo and the award-winning hit play adapted from it, War Horse is an episodic saga told from the horse’s point-of-view, an innocent farm animal sent off to war, an epochal conflict that will see millions of horses treated as cannon fodder and slaughtered.
The attention-grabbing device of the play of the same name was the use of life-size puppets as horses. The film’s horses are not nearly as arresting, even if they are showcased in a handsomely mounted production. With fourteen horses playing Joey, Spielberg hardly resorts to CGI-effects trickery at all — just a few seconds’ worth — in his attempt to create naturalistic magic.
Spielberg tries not to overdo the self-conscious tear-jerking. He succeeds, but at a price. And the reason for that is, to some degree, because, in terms of our emotional availability and identification with a central character, Spielberg can — cinematically speaking — scream himself hoarse, but, when all is said and done, a horse is still a horse. Of course, of course.
Which is why we wish there were much more of Emily Watson, the only human performer to make any kind of an impression. Once she disappears, we’re merely watching instead of emotionally reacting.
Thematically, Spielberg (Jaws, Schindler’s List, E.T.: the Extra-Tererrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark) is after the cruelty and grotesqueness of warfare, but he uses the PG-13-rated War Horse to address World War I obliquely and briefly, in contrast to the direct and extended way he explored the bloody carnage of World War II in Saving Private Ryan.
We know from the get-go that we’re in the hands of a master visual storyteller who never lets his adapted-from-a-play film seem stagebound. And if we resist some of his emotional flourishes and yearn for a dynamic human protagonist, we nonetheless notice the striking locations, the brilliant combat reenactments, the gracefully choreographed camera movements, the masterful John Williams score, and the haunting images offered as magical Spielbergian moments.
So we’ll saddle 3 stars out of 4 for a harrowing survival story and a fine family film. At this level of taken-for-granted cinematic accomplishment, complaining about shortcomings and extravagances feels a bit like looking a War Horse in the mouth. |
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