War Horse is a very cheesy family film about a horse.  It hits all the predictable notes designed to make you emotionally involved in the film, like the film within a film in some sort of comedy about who movies are made.  At the end of the movie, though, I found myself hoping for the reunion between Albert and his horse, Joey, but I wasn’t sure if it’s because I cared about them or simply because I wanted the 2 and a half hour movie to end.

To start off, this movie is incredibly beautiful from a cinematography standpoint.  The performances are fine, and the music is nice, but when you put it together, it just felt pointless.  The film is sappy, and it’s packed full of cliche moments.  You know when they talk about Oscar bait movies?  This is Oscar bait, but it was so far down the road of unbelievability that I thought there would be know way it received any accolades.  Well, I looked it up, and I suppose I forgot this was nominated for Best Picture.

Okay, look, I don’t want to be nothing but negative.  I’m tired of reacting this way to movies I don’t like, too.  And I know that anytime I don’t like a movie, my main complaint is that it’s full of cliches.  There’s got to be something more to my dislike of a movie than that because a lot of movies are full of cliches and moments that require a big suspension of disbelief.  When I analyze my own writing it sounds like I’m looking for every movie to be realistic, and that in itself is not realistic.  No movies is a perfect reflection of the real world, but most of them try to be a strong reflection of a type of world.

So what’s the world that Steven Spielberg is trying to show in War Horse?  I think we first need to step back and look at its main character, the horse.  What are the advantages or just the reasons for showing the war through a horse’s journey?  If someone told me the plot of this movie, and the horse’s involvement in the story, I might expect this to be an animated film like Spielberg’s previous one, The Adventures of Tintin.  That way you could make the horse a more active character and allow us to see the war through the horse’s eyes.  Of course, that presents a couple obvious problems.  First of all, it would be incredibly difficult and probably ill-advised to create an animated children’s film about a violent war.  Second, the war from the horse’s perspective is somehow more horrifying than from a human’s perspective.  The humans at least developed a brotherhood amongst each other.  The horses were mistreated by everyone involved in war.  They were worked until they died, and that was their treatment at the hands of the ‘good guys’ from their perspectives.  The horses had no enemies, and they were still slaughtered.

So I go back to the first question: Why a horse?  The biggest moment near the end of this film is when Joey the horse is spooked by the battle and runs himself into a trap of barbed wire.  The two warring sides momentarily call a truce so they can work together to free the horse.  It’s a nice moment, showing how little separates these two men who would otherwise try to murder each other.  So is the point of the whole story just to show how similar we all are?  That’s not a bad message, and I suppose it would make for a nice short film, just not a two and a half hour movie.

Joey is trained by Albert before the war, and Albert loves Joey.  Then the war comes and Loki (from The Avengers) buys Albert to be his mount in the war.  In what I would say is the most tragic moment, we see Loki and Joey ride towards German machine guns that will surely mow them down.  We get a slow motion shot of Loki’s face as he realizes he will die.  It’s a well-made scene, or just a well-executed shot.  Then Joey runs on by the machine guns, unscathed but without a rider.

So now Joey is in German hands, and he’s ridden by a young, well-meaning German horse trainer who wants to save his brother (I think it’s his brother) from the front lines so he basically kidnaps his brother, and they desert the army.  That night they’re captured and shot.

Now Joey is found by a young French girl named Emilie.  Emilie’s grandfather lets her keep the horse, and he just wants her to be happy since she’s all he has left of his family.  Well, the German army returns and steals Joey back along with a second horse that has been at Joey’s side this entire time.

Joey and the other horse drag heavy machinery into place, and this work usually kills the horses after they’ve dragged the weapons for too long.  Joey survives, however, and in the ensuing battle he escapes and runs free in the battlefield.  This is when he’s trapped, then freed, then Albert finds him.

So Albert eventually joined the war, and before he finds Joey, we follow him as he runs into battle alongside his best friend who’s name I forget and who doesn’t matter.  The friend only matters because he dies in battle, meant to symbolize what was lost in war.  The friend is such a nice, albeit personality-less character, and once they enlist in the war, you just know he’s not going to survive.  That’s because you know Albert sill survive, and they can’t both survive.  There is some parallelism between their friendship and Joey’s friendship with the other horse who dies around the same time as Albert’s friend.

This is so that when they reunite, both characters are damaged, and the idea is that finding each other will help them both heal again.  Also, the friend always dies in war.  The example I think of right away is Ryan Gosling’s friend played by Kevin Connolly in The Notebook (2004).

Albert is told, when the war ends, that Joey will be auctioned off.  Albert’s pals give him enough money to get the horse back, except that Emilie’s grandfather shows up and blows all the other offers out of the water.  It’s sad at first, because it seems like Albert won’t get Joey back.  Then the grandfather tells him how his granddaughter, Emilie, has died, and he wants the horse in her memory.  Look, I get that Joey is Albert’s horse, but jeez, the old guy could use Joey more.  We’re not meant to be conflicted when Joey ends up with Albert, so to make that clear, Joey chooses Albert.  This has multiple effects.  It allows us to see Albert give up Joey to the old man so we know that Albert is kind.  Then Joey picks Albert, allowing them to end up together, and making sure we know they have an unbreakable bond.

That’s sort of it.

This was a perfectly okay movie.  On one hand I feel like it aspired to so much, but there were so many movie and plot conventions that make me think the whole film aspired to nothing.  Spielberg knows the way movie works, and he’s well-versed in story structure, and he doesn’t try to break anything here.  This movie is only uplifting, and that’s not a bad thing.  Maybe I’m just jaded.  I do tend to react negatively towards movies that seem to be trying to force you to smile at the end.  I like movies with happy endings, but this one just felt hollow.  The final shots of the film are so familiar from any number of films that they didn’t feel like they were a part of the story.  I think the final shot of the film could have just as much of an impact as it did even without the 2 hours and twenty minutes beforehand.  If you combine the right imagery with the right music, it’ll often produce an emotional response.  None of this felt tied to the story because the story hardly felt tied together at all.  It’s just a collection of well-shot scenes with moving music and an animal, and the animal is key.

People love animals.  I do too.  Anytime I see an animal onscreen, I’m immediately rooting for it to stay alive.  This might even be in a movie in which there is no threat of death.  I see a kid walking a dog, and the first thing I think is “that dog better not die.”  That’s because I know how easy it is for a film to kill a dog because it produces such an easily achieved emotional punch.  I just wrote about Rogue One and the way that film shows you a young girl who watches her mother get shot and her father kidnapped.  That’s almost the same exact thing, and it’s not a subtle scene to show her complexity, it’s just a means to an end.  The end is that you’re sad.

So a film like this, maybe I don’t like it because I know it’s playing on our emotions.  It feels manipulative.  The film knows we really do not want to watch this horse die, so we just torture ourselves for a few hours watching the horse almost die.  Then when it doesn’t, we exhale and leave the theater.  Of course, the horse isn’t in war the entire time. The pre-war scenes are quite boring.  They’re full of things happening and people looking on with wonder.  I guess, I feel like this movie wasn’t allowing us to feel, it was trying to force us to feel.

You know that scene when Loki dies that I mentioned earlier?  That was a great scene because you’re allowed to feel whatever you want.  Sure we all probably felt something similar, but that look on his face, you can wonder what he’s feeling.  In other close up shots of people’s faces, the movie is telling you what you’re supposed to feel.  In other words, these aren’t characters, they’re just buttons pushed that are meant to make the audience react a certain way.  These characters are flat, uninteresting characters who all fill a role in making the plot move forward.

God, this movie begins with Joey’s birth, just to really make sure you’re afraid to watch the animal die.  And a lot of those scenes with Joey worked on me.  I wanted him to be okay, I even believed the friendship he had with the other horse.  So that’s what this movie is good at, animal wrangling.  I have no idea how you film a horse and make him or her do certain things.  Obviously you have a well-trained horse (apparently the main horse behind Joey also played Seabiscuit).  But the horse-dominant scenes have no dialogue, clearly, so the film has to make sure it visually tells the story it wants to tell.  Spielberg did a good job there, so there you go, I said a positive thing.

I’m sure that if I get a little older I will appreciate this film.  I’m already a pretty sentimental guy at times, but I don’t think that yet applies to films.  That isn’t to say I haven’t cried during or after a film before.  In fact, the first film I can remember making me cry was My Dog Skip (2000).  You know why?  Because of the damn dog.  Another movie people often say makes them cry is Marley & Me (2008).  You know why?  Because of the dog.

Dog movies make you cry, and horse movies are no different.  The movie John Wick (2014) is based almost entirely around the murder of a puppy.  That film operates in boldly broad strokes of good and evil as well as in terms of plot mechanics.  The filmmakers behind that movie just wanted man excuse to tell a violent action story about a badass with a gun.  A lot of movies are like that, but John Wick didn’t feel weighed down by trying to hide their movie tricks.  They just went ahead and did it.  The puppy is adorable, of course, and then the puppy is murdered in cold blood.  The story has you in the palm of their hands, and you’re now completely ready to watch John Wick murder a bunch of people.

So what else is there to say?  I’m not sure.  I can’t believe this movie was nominated for Best Picture.  Again, I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just… fine.  It’s a thing, but when you leave the theater I don’t think you’re left ruminating on the theme of this film or any of its characters.  If Albert had let Joey go home with the grandfather, then that might make me think a little more.  Joey touched a lot of people, not just Albert, so maybe Albert needs to let him go.  There’s sacrifice in war, and Albert didn’t lose anything except his friend who he was always going to lose because, again, that’s what his friend character was there for, to be killed, like a pawn.

Or maybe Joey wouldn’t be the same when he returned home.  A couple characters remark about what a strange beast this and other horses are because they’re built to run away, and this war has made them run towards battle.  It’s one of the most engaging moments in the film, but I think its undone by having Joey return home, in relatively good health.  If the message is that war is unnatural (because everyone loses something), then Joey shouldn’t be the same.  Whether it’s because he’s hurt or just forever skittish or something, Joey should not be the same horse.  But that goes against almost every Spielberg ending.  He likes his sunsets and people walking off into them.