Film File - War Horse
by John Daly Updated: Wednesday, 11th January, 2012 4:58pm
Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) prepares to take Joey into battle in this scene from 'War Horse' , Steven Spielberg's epic adventure set during the First World War.
In these first weeks of the new year, it seems fitting that a rousing and emotional film from one of cinema's most famous directors should dominate our screens.
'War Horse', a compelling tale of the special bond between man and beast has become a part of contemporary culture, a story from a century past that still resonates in the world of today. It all began when author Michael Morpurgo met an elderly military veteran in a bar and listened to him talk with passion not about his fellow soldiers but about the incredibly heroic horses with whom he served. This old soldier opened Morpurgo's eyes to the bonds between humans and animals that even battle could not tear asunder, and that kept so many going when they might have given up.
"Here I was listening to this old man who had tears in his eyes talking about a relationship he had with a horse on the Western Front decades ago. I learned that these horses were doing so much more than simply carrying soldiers or gun carriages. They deeply mattered to people."
In researching the book that would in turn spawn a hugely successful Broadway play and now Hollywood film, the writer discovered that one million horses went into battle with the British during WWI - and only 62,000 returned. Eight million horses on both the Allies and German sides perished in the Great War - from large draught horses to the show hunters favoured by the cavalry. Just like the men around them, they faced relentless artillery fire, poison gas, freezing winters, rampant disease, starvation, utter exhaustion and shock from being driven so hard. At times during WWI, as many as 1,000 horses a day arrived to replace those who had been lost. Spielberg believes a large part of the appeal of War Horse lies in the deep link that remains from those times when horses were so integral to the aims of human societies.
"Horses were the primary means of human transportation for centuries. Great armies fought on horses to great achievements. And yet, today they still feel very special to us. I think somewhere in our DNA, there will always be respect and admiration for horses."
From the very first frames, there is no doubting this is a Spielberg film in everything from the glorious panoramas of Devon to the mud-splattered, death pits of the Somme battlefield. By turns, sentimental, exciting, dramatic and inspiring, War Horse might not be everybody's cup of tea - but it will certainly have you talking well into the night. Set at the outbreak of WWI, it tells the story of Albert (Jeremy Irvine), the son of Ted and Rosie Narracott (Peter Mullan and Emily Watson), and owner of the film's principal character - Joey the horse. As in Morporgo's book, the tale is told from the horse's point of view - in particular, the unique bond between Albert and Joey that entwines their lives from beginning to end. Charting the life of Joey from racehorse to ploughhorse to war horse, the story unfolds in episodic form as he is bought by the army, separated from Albert, charging into massed machine gun fire, captured by the enemy, escapes through the deadly No Man's Land, until finally ... well, you can probably guess much of what follows. With his trademark instinct for character development allowing him outline a dozen stories in effortless interlocking sequence, Spielberg is guilty at times of over-egging the emotional mix and stretching credibility to the max - but always with a snap twist into another world just as the previous one begins to wane.
At 146 minutes, War Horse is an endurance race - but peppered with enough cinematic brilliance to ensure few will nod off at any point. One episode, at roughly the halfway point, occurs when Joey finds himself in the possession of a young French girl, Emilie (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup). Transforming the simplistic into a master class of cinematic technique, Spielberg mixes the bucolic beauty of the countryside with the ominous gathering of faraway gunfire as a sparkling adolescent and her ageing protector bestow their indomitable character into the horse's spirit. It lasts a mere fifteen minutes in a film populated with a dozen hugely memorable moments, but rings in the memory longer than the entirety of many other worthy films. With a host of solid performances from Benedict Cumberbatch, David Thwelis, Tom Hiddleston and Patrick Kennedy, War Horse makes for a fine start to the cinema entertainment of 2012. It may not be a perfectly rounded a film as others in the Spielberg stable like 'Saving Private Ryan' or 'Schindler's List' - but it has enough of his innate genius to make it a decent evening's entertainment in anyone's language.
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