IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched on Blu-Ray (borrowed)
Without a doubt, you can say that "War Horse" or "Gefährten" (companions) in the German version (if you don't count the fourth part of the Indiana Jones series) is the most scolded Spielberg of the last decades, is always treated a little bit stepmotherly, which is probably simply because so-called "horse movies" just don't fit into this era with their unrestrainedly trusting and blue-eyed attitude. Only one more seems to believe in this and that is Steven Spielberg.
In this film Spielberg moves on thin ice. He tells a boy-meets-horse story about friendship between a horse and an idealistic boy, in which he wants to revive old Hollywood (or even a traditional cinema of "epic" storytellers), as once produced by Ford (How Green was my Valley) or David Lean, which Spielberg openly quotes.
One can actually say (even if the film is set on British soil and was made by an American filmmaker) that the film evokes a bit of a homeland film ideology to a certain extent. It begins with playful cheerfulness, which John Williams accompanies with light-footed sounds, before Spielberg slowly begins to dramatize the material. It is a routine work that Spielberg has delivered with this film, which he once again entrusts entirely to naivety. He once again skilfully uses the keyboard to arouse emotions, to which John Williams contributes a substantial part with his sublime music. Spielberg keeps the material easily digestible, yet his film is at times shockingly banal (e.g. the thing with the plough) and transparent.
When Spielberg then separates his horse from the boy and sends it off to the World War I, where it changes from owner to owner, most of whom seem relatively interchangeable and who all mean well with the animal, the film becomes more and more bland.
What's interesting, though, is that the horse always remains a companion and Spielberg's focus is often more and more on people. Spielberg's movie actually "only" works as a sentimental overpowering cinema, something that simply didn't work for me, because the film lives more from the moment than from (as said before rather pale) characters.
Whereby I must at least say that Spielberg has created a comparatively pleasant, even if altogether harmless, and historically oriented representative of the "horse film" (if one wants to accept this classification at all), in which Spielberg, as always, is less concerned with the concrete history itself, but more with the emotionality of the myth, which he describes by means of his heroic horse. But the final pictures, where Spielberg quotes "Gone with the Wind", the silhouettes in the sunset, among other things, are visually, it has to be said, really phenomenal.
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