War Horse

A nostalgic look back to the heartiest, most melodramatic stage of cinematography. Film poetry for people who remember those times, maybe the last of its kind. Had it been twenty minutes shorter, it would have been one of Steven Spielberg’s best movies. That it’s one of his most personal films can be felt from every scene. (26/02/2012)

This is a pretty special movie for me and I must say that I really enjoyed it. Spielberg filmed this in his own way and it ended up so that every scene looks like a poster. Some scenes stand out incredibly. The ride through the battlefield is the most powerful scene of the movie, thanks to John Williams’ music too. Sometimes maybe half of the good feeling from the movie comes from the somebody sitting next to you. (27/02/2012)

War Horse follows in the footsteps of The Red Baron and the Flyboys. A wave of renewed interest in WW1 would be a great thing, it would just have to be based on films that aren't such failures. The memory of Düsseldorf will be more eternal and colorful than a sunset in all shades of orange. (23/02/2012)

A film about love, goodness and horses, in which the Great War also looks many times more pathetic and moralistic than in all of the anti-war pamphlets of the 1920s and 1930s. Paradoxically, this is not a problem at all - the main drawback of this captivating spectacle is Spielberg's absolute fondness for the surface. Everything inner and psychological disappears from the shots - everything is taken over by a rich visual arrangement. People and horses are explicitly props in the creator's professorial exhibition. Moments of emotion always and again come across the same thing - it's not the human (horse) story that impresses us, it's rather the respectable audiovisual construction, under which (unlike Steven's famous films) there is nothing at all, just a genre vacuum. This is simply not enough for a fairy tale, which War Horse is more than anything else. (20/02/2012)

This is going against the flow a little, but my problem with Warhorse isn’t that it’s a “chintzy Hollywood Spielbergesque tearjerker", but that in the end it isn’t like that at all. But that’s what it’s trying to be; too much, in fact; it is made like that but in its core it lacks the foundation to all movies like this - emotions. The bond between Albert and Joey is so slap-dash; it is ground up into mini-stories that blend into one; in the end I didn’t give a damn about either of them or about the movie either. And the movie should either have been much shorter (and just about those two) or should have been a regular mini-series, where each episode could tell one of the ten-minute escapades we see here. (15/01/2012)