介绍:
The weirdest thing happened when I watched the War Horse. Towards the end of the movie, I heard gentle sobbing and thought it must be some young girl with a heart of gold. I was surprised to find that the cries actually came from a man whose hair had turned a touch of grey. I became even more confused when I noticed tears on the face of another middle-aged man sitting beside me, shimmering in the light from the cinema screen. He too was weeping at Steven Spielberg's latest creation.
I could not understand what these men felt. I have personally never put up so much of an effort to wave off a director's call for my sympathy. Not being an animal lover obviously helped, but there is so much about the film that was a turn off for me.
The first thing to note is what appears to be the director's obsession with war films and the grand topic of humanity. Certainly, wars films are very suitable ground for a discussion on humanity. But if I had created Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, I wouldn't consider making another war film, regardless of how novel the narrative. But Spielberg did it, and rather awkwardly so, as his exploration on war goes no further than a reiteration of the sentence: the war has taken everything from every man.
The unconvincing story also added fuel to my fire. The scene where the young lad and his thoroughbred pet horse plough the stony hillside of the British countryside is spiritually elevating, but this scene also alerted me to Spielberg's manipulative style. After this point, I remained unaffected by the storyline and was only capable of uttering a few sighs of incredulity as the horse survives the atrocities of World War I only to be reunited with its master.
Perhaps I shouldn't blame the director, or the screen writers Richard Curtis and Lee Hall. When you adapt a children's novel into a more realistic form, there is bound to be some issues regarding credibility. But the way in which the movie is presented also causes a certain amount of discomfort. The unrealistic lighting, so uncharacteristic of Spielberg's usual style, made it hard for viewers to truly engage with the story.
Horse trainer Bobby Lovgren, among others, deserves credit as the horses in this film totally outshone the human characters. However, the scene in which soldiers venture into no-man's land to cut the horse loose from barbed wire is interesting enough to deserve applause.
In general, the film is a failure of emotion, cinematography and philosophy. Despite the creative attempt to lead the narrative with a horse, Steven Spielberg did not break any new ground in his latest war film experiment. On a scale from one to ten, I give this movie a five.
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