War Horse OR The Horse That Stopped The Plot

War Horse: A Full and Unedited Review

I want to clear something up, right off the bat here. This is not a situation of “ If you didn’t want to see a movie about a killer pineapple, why did you get it?” ( to quote The Gingerdead man 2.) I knew what to expect from this movie. I knew that it was going to be a Horse movie, and hell I don’t mind animal films, a little tired of a premise, which is why I usually avoid them, but this promised to be the guy’s animal film. Something that combined the majesty of a horse, with the action of Saving Private Ryan.

But no, actually, fuck no, I am breaking the fuck barrier already. This movie should have been simple for Speilbergo to just piss money at and make a good film, Guys+war+horses, nothing epic, nothing groundbreaking, but a really good premise.

The first thing I want to note, is that I along with the others that watched it, were not looking to Riff the film, going into it thinking it would suck. And in fact this is how I first got the sinking feeling that it was going to suck.

The movie starts and the first thing your introduced to is some very bad accents. To the point where it feels more like the characters are in the friggen shire than any place on earth. And this isn’t helped by the lack of effort into the locations, everything seems a bit too big for the characters, whether this was bad camerawork, or something intentional, I don’t know. But right off the bad my initial reaction was hobbit jokes.

But hey, it’s a war movie right? We have to have reasons to like the characters , and care when they get some part shot off, so the sinking feeling wasn’t quite entrenched.

Then comes the horse, or rather horses in question. One of the many ways you could describe this movie is a horse buddy comedy. Don’t worry though I have others.

Anyway, getting back to the horses. You know what made movies like Milo and Otis, Homeward Bound, Spirit, Black Beauty, Old Yeller, among many others? The fact that you liked the animals. The people making the film took steps to ensure that the animals seemed friendly ( with the obvious exception of the end of old yeller.) , or funny, with war horse, this just didn’t seem the case.

We don’t see much of the horse being a cute lil horse, in fact when the plot actually gets its morning coffee into it, we are already in the shire. And the horse just seems, odd. Don’t know how to exactly explain it. For one, you can tell the wranglers were told to make this horse unique , which they chose to do through giving it kind of, cat esque mannerisms. Having it rub up against people a lot, and generally act kind of cat like. This just didn’t come off right to me, much like the curse in D and D in which one’s horse becomes a carnivore, the juxtaposition of a herbivore, with a carnivore’s tendencies just seems… offputting , to put it mildly.

Then they try and make the horse seem willful, but really it just makes the horse come off as an asshole. Why? You may ask. Well , the issue is that they try and make this horse like the animals from Homeward Bound, or Milo and Otis, by making it appear smarter than your standard animal. Combine it with the horse refusing to do things, and you just have a dislike of the horse right off of the bat.

The secondary horse is a bit better, and for my money, it seemed annoyed by the first. But that may just be me projecting at this point.

So after things chill out in the shire, we get our first whiff of the plot. A war started, and apparently every fucking person in Ireland knows this horse is the only way to win. The original owner of the horse gets shafted on the price, and you notice one of the first things of the movie that gets under the skin of a film fan. The sheer fucking amount of subplots.

I could wait till the end, but here is a good place to point it out. Get used to the 20 minutes of one person , then jumping to the next. This horse, it is an attention whore, it doesn’t care if it is the good guys, the bad guys, or anyone in between, it just wants to get as many subplots into its life as possible. It knows it is the best horse in the shire, and wants to advertise this fact.

This is about the point, that I , in still trying to like this movie made the guess that “ The plot is on its way.” Surely we were over the introduction stage of every war movie, and we would soon see this horse stomping German corpses in no time.

Fuck, No.

This Is the point where it starts to feel like the movie is fucking with you. There are no less than three scenes , in which you think a battle is going to occur, but they pan back, and it is a training exercise, or just looked like a battle. It is as if the director is dangling the possibilities of this movie in front of you, then yanking them away at the last second, and laughing.

After a period of time that is both too long, and not long enough to give a shit about what is going on, we actually get a battle. Seriously, a real battle. Well, maybe that is being a bit too generous.

We get swords that look like they were straight out of a high school metal shop, slashing deaths that are straight out of a old, BAD , kung fu flick, and the cinematic equivalent of premature ejaculation when you realize that the battle is going to be short lived.

They charge in on horses, slash at some folks, then reality makes a harsh appearance, as the camp full of gents with guns realize that it is just blokes on horses with shit swords coming after them.

This is one of the biggest thorns in my ass about this movie. 99% of the time , realism is spat upon in favor of plot. The only times it seems to come up is when it would save money for an action scene. Then there is the fact that, when you think about it for a moment, our brave hero’s first act, is to pearl harbor a group of soldiers, with blunt slashing weapons. Not only making them dishonorable, but dumb as fuck to boot.

So now the horse is a german horse. Same shit, different country, I guess the horse was just glad to be out of the shire.

We see a couple of people, or rather hear, as it is behind a windmill shot, and the horse is now a French horse. Again, I could go into the nuances of this change, how the characters were dim and uninteresting, how the evil german seemed more like a slightly bad german. But what is the point. This is the point in the movie where you realize it is just going to keep doing this. Switch to a different group of people and show how much they dig this horse.

And there is nothing special about the horse, other than its offputting body language, and kind of dickish attitude. ( I seem to be ignoring the second horse, but I have seldom seen such a useless character. Essentially it is a non speaking straight man to the first horse.) If I were to hazard a guess, this horse simply has terrible luck and keeps running across Equinophiles, but I guess I will have to wait for the directors cut to confirm my suspicions.

So there is another half dozen subplots, and this is the point where you start to realize , this movie is shit. It is an hour and 20 minutes in, there has been one battle, worth about 4 minutes, and 1 hour 16 minutes of subplots. Even if the rest of the movie, which is still an hour and ten minutes is pure gold, its still going to suck.

After you choke down another subplot or two you nearly shit your pants as they return to one, out of the blue, sans fucking horse.

Your thrust into a world war 1 battle, a real, for the love of chirst battle. Sure the movie only has about 50 minutes left to go, but this is what you want to see. Guys are getting shot, blokes are getting caught up in barbed wire, bombs go off, mustard gas is hanging out like a more pleasant version of the smell, and what your feeling isn’t so much surprize, as relief, holy fuck its actually a war movie. You know, like the title would imply.

So now, you kind of shrug off your previous bitterness, and if you’re a real film buff you might even find yourself thinking “ You know, the juxtaposition of the shire life with the battles, is actually a pretty good idea.”. But then you find yourself thinking , almost against your own will, like a kid saying “Bloody Mary” 3 times into a mirror, “ But where is the horse?”.

As the battle goes on for what seems like forever in comparison to the other battles ( one thing I will say the movie was great at is manipulating your sense of time, but this isn’t exactly a compliment.) this question keeps nagging at you. Sure it is cool to finally get some action, but shouldn’t we be getting some horse flavored action? Isn’t that the entire point of this fucking piece of shit? And even though you are seeing the first good part of the film, you get pissed off, where is my guy shooting a-holes from horseback, where is my soldier leaping bomb explosions on his equine companion?

Then the battle ends, we are still in a battle, for lack of a better term, but things quiet down.

And the horse, or rather the horses make an appearance. But you know what they are not doing, kicking any kind of ass , or helping in the kicking of ass. As both Trevor and Tina pointed out, Run Horse Run, is a very apt description, we get to see the horse dodge, duck, and that is about it. Fuck, replace the bombs with fences, and this is just the same horse shit we have seen in every other fucking horse movie.

Time for a bit of a sidetrack.

There is a scene I neglected to mention when the horse is a French horse. In which the horse either can’t, or won’t jump over a 1 foot barrier for a little girl. After watching it leap around like a parkour practitioner , again, you feel this horse is just an asshole.

The good horse I don’t talk about much dies, I think, it wasn’t quite clear. And then comes the big fucking scene , that was ripped straight out of The Dog Who Stopped The War.

The shit horse gets stuck in some barbed wire. In any other animal movie, even if I wasn’t digging it, I would want to see the horse saved. But not this fuckin horse, nothing it has done to date in the movie has endeared it to me.

So both sides decide to stop firing, and send the two most obsessed with this horse members out to save this horse. This is a long drawn out scene, that is reminiscent of every defusing the bomb scene ever, with the exception of the fact that it has no tension. It is even stated that the horse is not going to die from the wounds, but rather if it is done improperly, the horse will simply be hurt. For my money, I think jigsaw’s grandfather set up this trap.

After this drags right the fuck on, the two soldiers, one german, one from the shire. Get into a bit of an argument about who gets to keep the horse. At one point one mentions a bare knuckle boxing match in the middle of the battlefield to decide this.

My heart leapt, fuck that is a cool idea. These two soldiers in the middle of a cease fire, in a blood and corpse soaked battlefield, duking it out, no gloves for this god damn equine magguffin. May not make the movie a classic , but would have bumped it up from a 2.5 to a 4.5. If you think anything like me, you now are on the edge of your seat, maybe the movie won’t be worth it, but at least it will have one really cool scene.

No, fuck that. Apperantly in the god damn shire , bare knuckle boxing is not fair play. ( fucking ironic considering that all shire jokes aside, where they are in the film is known for bare knuckle boxing.) And instead of having a sweet fistfight in a battle field, Asshole and Der Asshole, decide to play rock paper scissors. Asshole wins, subplot over.

The end of this movie ( which really should have been a shot of Asshole after the fistfight.) really cements in its absurdity. Everyone on the fucking planet wants this horse, there is a bidding war, more cementing in just how much everyone would kill and rape their own grandmother for this horse. The end, but you know dragged out for another half hour.

This movie had so much premise, pretty much a guaranteed success if done right. But it simply wasn’t. Any movie that is 2.5 hours long , yet somehow has too many sub plots, is just a catastrophy of film making. And a good example of how much Spielburg is getting by on just being speilburg. Make it shiney, pimp it out, rake in the profits.