Movie Review: "War Horse"

Theatrical Release Poster, courtesy of Touchstone Pictures

Being a western artist and horse enthusiast, my father was very anxious to see the new Stephen Spielberg film War Horse from the moment he saw the previews and, myself being a cinephile who is willing to give just about any movie a chance (particularly when Dad's buying the tickets), I happily obliged when he asked me today if I'd like to accompany him to the movie theatre. Going in, I had next to no knowledge about the film, its plot, or even the fact that it was a Stephen Spielberg production, but I had some inkling that it might be a run of the mill boy-meets-horse, boy-falls-in-love-with-horse cliché. The beginning of the film, while charming and beautiful in its setting of an early-20th century Scottish farm, reinforced my preconceived notions of its potential triteness, only for the middle and ending to blow me away with its depth and humanity, and remind me once more what a fool I inevitably make of myself when I try to play the role of holier-than-thou, elitist critic. Yes, War Horse is a "horse movie"- but it's more than that. It's a film that uses the horse's story as a mechanism for commentary of a much deeper sort- namely, the senselessness of war, and the awful effects and influences it can have on human beings. I certainly know that War Horse's depiction of World War I, as experienced by Joey (the film's equine protagonist), was enough to make me think twice the next time I thoughtlessly prepare myself to throw my lot in with the war hawks in society. Whether it was the scene in which a regiment of German troops execute two teenage brothers for desertion, or when the British (the supposed "good guys") charge into a German camp and proceed to slash everyone they can find only to ultimately be gunned down themselves, every moment in the film following Joey's sale to the British army begs the question of the audience: Is war really worth this? I know that by the film's final scene, I personally felt that it isn't, or at least it wasn't in World War I, or even probably in most wars. War makes a monster of man, by convincing him to see his fellow man's life as something less than precious, indeed, something to deliberately seek the destruction of. As someone who vigorously supported intervention in Libya last year and who has defended to my more pacifist friends the United States's historical interventions in both the First World War which War Horse chronicles, and the later War in Vietnam, War Horse gave me cause to contemplate just exactly what could possibly make such a hellish reality as war worth it? I can not answer that question tonight, in this post. All I can say is that it is a question worth asking and thinking long and hard about, and War Horse's asking of it in the dramatic and heart-wrenching way that it does, alone makes it a film worth seeing. Four stars out of five.