Dated depiction of combat: Film review
War Horse looks sanitised compared to Steven Spielberg’s other films depicting armed conflict
STEVEN Spielberg is a great director of war cinema, but until now his efforts have focussed on the years during or immediately preceding the Second World War.
As he admitted in a recent interview, the First World War never interested him especially, and so War Horse marks something of a departure into new territory for the veteran film-maker.
So how has he fared? Well, in keeping with his previous Second World War yarns, the action sequences in War Horse are superb. Spielberg spares no expense in his portrayal of the grimy claustrophobia of trench warfare, and the arbitrary slaughter of ‘going over the top'.
Impressive too are aspects of the cinematography, especially the remarkable final scene, shot in wash of lurid orange and featuring our titular hero in flattering profile. In the hands of a less assured director, this loving blazon of a great big horse might raise a giggle, but Spielberg manages to evoke all the great John Ford era Westerns with a bold, populist style.
In spite of these strengths, however, War Horse never quite attains the level of Spielberg's best work. The principal problem consists of a certain directorial squeamishness when it comes to representing the conflict itself, a strange hesistancy from the man who gave us unflinching depictions of carnage and suffering in Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List. Maybe it's just a function of the narrative, or perhaps of the 12a rating, but War Horse is an oddly bloodless affair.
Bullets strike without blood, men fall without obvious wounds, and the whole thing feels somewhat sanitised. One early scene is symptomatic of the problem, depicting the execution of two German deserters outside a windmill in which they had sought shelter. As the firing squad takes aim, our view is temporarily obscured by a windmill blade, only to reveal two slumped figures as it revolves.
It is a neat shot, and it spares us a painful moment, but ultimately I didn't want to be spared, and didn't feel it necessary to shield the audience in this way.
I understand Michael Morpurgo's original story was written for young adults, and maybe Spielberg has an eye on this audience, but I still felt War Horse rather relegated the First World War setting to the role of backdrop, an occasionally intrusive distraction rumbling away just out of frame.
Still, given the paucity of First World War films for mainstream audiences, even a romanticised depiction is preferable to none.
It is sometimes easy to forget that the First World War is something of a neglected war in the United States, existing on that uneasy border between living memory and the history books.
If this rather mythologicised treatment is what it takes to reconcile modern audiences to this difficult period in our shared history, that can only be to the good.
Rating: **
