It’s all at once big-screen fluid with a sweeping canvas, a throwback feel to Gone With the Wind (which is ironic as the ending scene is an exact replica). It’s got the John Williams over-bearing soundtrack, it’s got Steven Spielberg as the Master director
behind the camera, and it’s got a gentle, playful feel right down to a Mother Goose who cackles and circles around the farm on command. But something is too force-fed in this premise of the love story between a young boy, Albert (newcomer Jeremy
Irvine) and his adopted foal, Joey.
It all begins when Albert’s father, Ted (Peter Mullan) owes his English landlord money from the farm, and his wife, Rose (Emily Watson) says the horse is useless because he can’t plow a field. Our beloved horse Joey is eventually sold to the soldiers to become – ta da – the War Horse, and our film goes from Oklahoma to Saving Private Ryan, or in this case,
Saving Private Joey. Your Albert finds himself enlisting in WWI, France 1914, and we find our horse having the nine
lives of a cat!
The film always feels overly intended and we never quite know who to bond with as there’s large chunks of time where the humans we’ve come to follow are MIA from the screen. With no option we bond with the horse, which is what one would suppose Spielberg intended. Alas, in the final fifteen minutes of the film we feel emotionally invested our War Horse (surprise,
surprise) just when the movie turns into Lassie Comes Home! Three tiaras for the wire cutting scene