War Horse (2012)

I was really worried when I checked my local Vue cinema times and saw this wasn’t on that I’d missed it, but fortunately it seemed to just be Vue as my local Odeon did still have showings, phew! War Horse is an epic war film directed and produced by the legend that is Steven Spielberg, adapted for the screen by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, and of course based on the children’s book by British author Michael Morphugo. This is not the first time War Horse has been adapted is has also been a very successful stage production on the West End in London. The cast for this film are a real mixture of faces you’ll know and faces you might not know, including Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Marsan, and Jeremy Irvine took on the lead role of young Albert. However the star of the show was really the horse Joey, I was little unsure how that was going to work, I never read the book because as a child animal leads never really appealed to me so this film was going to be a new experience for me.

In the rolling countryside of Devon, England a young boy named Albert admires the birth and growth of a thoroughbred foal on a farm near his own. Much to his wife’s dismay Albert’s father buys the thoroughbred horse rather than one more suitable for ploughing and hard labour. Albert takes it on himself to train the horse and calls him Joey, the two becoming inseparable. But when their harvest fails and they risk losing their farm if they don’t pay the rent, Albert’s father is forced to sell Joey to a British cavalry officer. This is at the outbreak of World War I and so Joey finds himself being shipped to France for battle. After a disastrous offensive Joey is captured by the Germans and from that point changes hands twice more before eventually becoming caught in the barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Meanwhile Albert, now a private, is fighting hard to stay alive but at the same time hopes he will be able to find Joey again. After all they have been through will Albert and Joey return home together?

War Horse for me was a sweeping film following the heartbreaking struggle of a horse just trying to keep living and of his young owner desperately trying to bring him home. What I loved about the concept of the main character being a horse was the fact that he brought no bias to the story, he was just simply following his instinct to live, and in doing so could see the good and the bad people for what they were not for what side they were fighting on. This is particularly poignantly when it comes to the First World War as I fear the soldiers themselves didn’t really know who they were fighting or why, there wasn’t really a ‘bad guy’ to the war like there was in the Second World War. I could talk about the performances of the actors they were very good but really it was all about Joey, and something else that really knocked my socks off were the special effects. I would presume that as much as possible was filmed with real horses but there were moments of danger and possibly injury where they must have switched to cgi…but you really couldn’t tell the switch was beautifully seamless. Especially in the scenes of battle where Joey runs through and over trenches, barbwire fences, soldiers, and even tanks. The movement of action was excellent as well really helped by some great sweeping camera shots that seemed to just keep going and going, reflecting how Joey kept going and going.

I could talk about War Horse all day to be honest. It was truly a heartbreaking film of beauty, love, war, death, but also hope. I couldn’t recommend this film more highly to all bookworms young and old, and whether you’ve read the book or not. Just be warned you may need a box of tissues on stand-by.

See Also:

• The Lovely Bones (2010)
• Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)
• The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010)
• The Borrowers (2011)