War horse, the movie, reviewed

The new Spielberg movie, War Horse, started bad and got worse. Contrived, and appealing to childish ideals and dreams about what relationships among horses, and between horses and humans are like, the move was a real disappointment. Worse, it was attended by almost a full house on Christmas Day, and the audience clapped at the end of it. I thought, “Brother, this is going to make my job as a horse trainer that much harder, as people expect me to train with magic and not logic.”

In the movie, the young horse is not handled until he is about three years old. Not likely in the setting in which that horse was born. Then he is trained by a complete novice who talks to him in English and the horse learns everything he tries to teach him in a couple seconds. When the horse doesn’t understand right away, the boy just talks to him in a more sentimental tone and he is suddenly trained. It’s as if they didn’t have one knowledgeable horse person on the set, and if they did, he or she was ignored. When the boy plowed the field with the horse and the plow split a huge boulder in half, I thought, “Why stop there? Why don’t you just put a red cape on this horse!”

All the horse handling scenes are just that bad. Another of my favorites is the placing of the harness collar on the horse’s head (this happens a couple times in the movie, and it’s pathetic every time). You don’t stand in front of a horse and shove a collar in his face. Of course he won’t put his head in it!

The anthropomorphic relationship between the two horses is also painfully ridiculous. When one horse insists on being the one harnessed so his buddy can rest, . . . this is beyond anything an animal with a walnut sized brain can do.

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On a positive note, the horse actor was really great. He was very well trained by someone who certainly didn’t use the techniques shown in this movie! Maybe they should have consulted this person for advice on realism.

Spielberg, of course, is a pro at producing for a child’s mind (yet often the extreme violence does not offer something a parent is comfortable exposing their children to), and it seems this movie fits that pattern. When the two young boys were executed by the firing squad of their own people, after we came to like these boys, I thought, “Glad I don’t have a young child here.” The horrors of World War I are relived in this movie and it’s not fare for the young or the faint-of-heart.

The first two minutes of this movie had us almost out of our chairs, ready to leave, but I had heard a review that said it got better. Obviously, that reviewer knew nothing about horses! In the final analysis, the movie lost us and never won us back. What a disappointment!

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