War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

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D_B
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#51 Post by D_B » Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:07 pm

Well, I admit I am not a huge fan of John Ford (my favorite film of his is "Pilgrimage"), but I have seen a LOT of Ford's films and to me, much of War Horse struck me as very Ford-like, and in many cases even better-looking because I personally find most Technicolor of the 50's and early 60's to be quite ugly.

In much of the early era of color films there was a slavish insistence that all skin tones be one or two specific shades of pink that totally screwed with overall color palates.

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knives
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#52 Post by knives » Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:21 pm

What does Ford's ability to work in colour have to do with Spielberg's inability to capture his pathos?

D_B
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#53 Post by D_B » Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:50 pm

knives wrote:What does Ford's ability to work in colour have to do with Spielberg's inability to capture his pathos?
All I can say is that for me, a filmmaker's use of 'color' is an essential element to their entire visual aesthetic - which is something I take very seriously.

One of the many reasons I can hardly stand watching "The Searchers" is the color is just so garish and ugly. Granted, in Ford's day Technicolor would send an 'expert' onto the set with demands that things be shot 'just so' - so maybe Ford had no choice in how the color looked.

As for pathos, I think Ford and Spielberg are fairly equal when it comes both having the talent to capture genuine sentiment while also having a weakness for pushing things overboard into maudlin sentimentality (though I would say Spielberg is worse).

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CSM126
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#54 Post by CSM126 » Wed Jan 11, 2012 10:31 am

Anyone who calls Ford and Spielberg equal on any level loses credibility. Ford was far too elegant a filmmaker to be compared to the cymbal-banging monkey that Spielberg is.

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Brian C
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#55 Post by Brian C » Wed Jan 11, 2012 11:22 am

I think you hit on something there. "Elegant" is a good way to describe what was missing from War Horse and why it did not feel Ford-like at all to me.

D_B
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#56 Post by D_B » Wed Jan 11, 2012 3:46 pm

I am all over the map about both Spielberg and Ford, love and absolutely detest films by both.

Overall, I think Spielberg has a far greater cinematic imagination and is more ambitious (not a bad thing), as opposed to Ford who was a classicist who strove to be more 'invisible'. You can call that 'elegant', some others could call that 'safe'.

But Spielberg I feel is a coward who is constantly undermining his films for fear of audience rejection. I think Ford had it easier and harder because he worked as a cog in the studio system and taking big risks was not really an option unless its what the studio wanted. One has to wonder what Ford would have done if he had as much creative freedom as Spielberg does now.

Spielberg movies make me sadder than Ford's because I see him undercutting his own great potential time and again, but even so, it makes me a bit sad watching Ford films where I feel like a lot of times, certain actors were forced on him by the studio (Victor Mature in "Clementine" comes to mind because that is one of my favorite Ford films).

Putting all that aside, sometimes Spielberg makes films in such horribly bad taste and judgement that it boggles the imagination ("Hook"). Somebody would have to pay me to see "Tintin".

Getting back to Warhorse, I think there were many sublimely beautiful, elegant moments. Spielberg aims high and for me often hits the mark, but even so, as I said in my original post about the film, it is undercut (again) by his timidity about alienating the lowest common denominator in the audience.

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MichaelB
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#57 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jan 11, 2012 4:09 pm

D_B wrote:Somebody would have to pay me to see "Tintin".
I gladly paid to see Tintin and generally had a pretty great time: both the things I was concerned about (fidelity to Hergé, artificial-looking animation) turned out to be non-issues. Granted, it's Spielberg letting his hair down and enjoying himself, but that's something to be encouraged.

It's certainly light years ahead of Hook, which I agree is pretty unendurable.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#58 Post by matrixschmatrix » Wed Jan 11, 2012 4:41 pm

Tintin also had one of the best titles sequences I've seen in a long time

rs98762001
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#59 Post by rs98762001 » Thu Jan 12, 2012 3:16 pm

MichaelB wrote:I gladly paid to see Tintin and generally had a pretty great time: both the things I was concerned about (fidelity to Hergé, artificial-looking animation) turned out to be non-issues. Granted, it's Spielberg letting his hair down and enjoying himself, but that's something to be encouraged.
I wasn't crazy about Tintin, but it's also light years ahead of War Horse, which is completely unendurable.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#60 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Mon Jan 16, 2012 4:24 pm

Agreed - the rest of the movie was pretty mediocre though.
matrixschmatrix wrote:Tintin also had one of the best titles sequences I've seen in a long time

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Dylan
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#61 Post by Dylan » Sat Aug 24, 2013 2:13 pm

I was surprisingly impressed with this. Yes, it had those Spielberg "over-done" moments but I thought it really worked. The score, which critics slammed, was amazing. I didn't think it was over-emotional, especially given the nature of the film overall, but just about right for it. I would go as far as to say that it's one of the very best scores of the last several years - it was a real symphonic score and not just some sonic wallpaper.

I'd heard War Horse had nods to Ford-Hawks-Gone With the Wind, and while that's true it's also never that blatant. There's even a It's a Wonderful Life moment when the batallion
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pools money so the guy can buy back his horse.
It's Ford, in that Devon felt very Irish and had those community moments (everyone watching the horse plow the field) and certain shots that were similar to The Searchers. Not much Hawks except that Sgt. York is about farmers working rough land. The Gone With the Wind stuff were crane shots over the battlefield and the glowing golden finale. I'm two ways about the ending.
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It was an aesthetic choice to go all golden at the end. And given the overall design, it wasn't thematically off. Once again Spielberg is doing his old "homecoming" theme. The boy & the horse are separated and come back together at the end of the movie. So many Spielberg films use this same structure. The thing the characters want is to be at home with love. "Home" might even be beyond the grave in some cases. But "home" whatever it is, this land of peace & love, is golden, so it's only right that it should appear a hyper-real space.


The guts of the film are about irony. The ultimate irony is that people treat the animals with more love & respect than they do each other. People are at war but the animals are considered innocent and must be loved & respected. The idea of two sides taking a break from war over some reason is an old one but it was a great sequence anyway when
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the two soldiers come out to clip the barb wire off the horse. They cut at the same time. Then to decide who gets the horse, they flip a coin. If only people could flip a coin there wouldn't be WW1 to begin with.
I guess that's also one of the themes. There were other ironies of course, like Emily going up the hill and into the Germans, or the two boys
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being killed as deserters.


I liked the episodic nature of the film. This approach doesn't always work but it got me here. Each episode was like a little short movie. Most come to sad ends though the film overall does not.

A lot of people found this film "unfashionable," and I have to guess that it's because War Horse is ultimately a Romantic vision. I personally like the aspect of how in the midst of war there were a lot of decent people. In that respect it was a positive film in an age where I feel cold and clinical works about people with damaging or violent flaws is becoming more "fashionable."

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colinr0380
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Re: War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

#62 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Nov 05, 2018 6:03 am

I finally caught up with this on a recent television screening and pretty much agree with Dylan about the big theme of this film being about the way that people care more for the life of an animal than they do each other and of the trenches being worse than any stable, and packed full of more dehumanised bodies, soldiers having to pass over all of their valuables (the objects that make them individual and unique) before their common fate, though it is also a kind of paen to a kind of 'gentlemanly' warfare being superceded by industrialised slaughter. Manners and honourable modes of behaviour, with obligations felt between the privileged classes and the peasants toiling on the land for the resources that are taken from them get stripped away (quite suddenly with the departure of Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch's characters almost immediately on entering the conflict) to a certain 'free market' perspective on everything being necessary and used without any consideration as to its value to the people back home, or feelings of duty to keep another being (human or otherwise) safe from harm due to short term needs winning out. Both forms of behaviour are kind of exploitative of those at the bottom, but the free market model is even more brutal and less considerate to keeping a society functioning than even the upper-lower class divisions are. Though of course as with every societal structure you can get people who feel their obligations more as well as those who can be more exploitative because the needs of the wider situation 'justifies' doing so.

I especially liked the shift in the young man from being rather too eager to go to war (shades of the teenage son in War of the Worlds again) contrasted against the father not wanting to think about his Boer War experiences becoming at the end a kind of bonding reunion between father and son who have both shared their experiences of war, though it is perhaps a little bit darker than that reunion implies by having the wartime experiences of father and son be on either side of that gentlemanly/mechanised warfare divide, so even though they both fought they probably have fundamentally different experiences of the nature of war. As different as the next generation in World War Two would have, and so on. Technology evolves, the teenage soldier raw recruit stays much the same whatever the era (or culture), but their experience radically changes depending on the warzone.

That also got me thinking that this is an interesting companion piece to Saving Private Ryan. Mostly in that the moment of reunion is fully dwelt upon in War Horse in the way that it really was not in the earlier film (due to it being Tom Hanks' story more than Matt Damon's, despite being seen through Damon's character's idealised eyes), and the final sunset shot on the fields is very much the equivalent of the idealised image of the mother back on the homestead receiving the bad news early on in Private Ryan. The conflict between people on horseback with sabres versus machine guns is obviously a bit more one sided here though! I suppose the one benefit of mechanised warfare is that animals are not quite as integral to fighting on the front lines any more (they have been humanely retired from many conflicts), though that is cold comfort to the human beings that advances in technology have now enabled to get massacred faster and in greater numbers.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that although there is a slightly humanised German solder in Saving Private Ryan (who turns out to be duplicitous), we get shown life behind the front lines for British, German and the French sides of the conflict through the journey of the horse. Only that animal is able to cross all boundaries (and presumably all languages sound the same - English - to the horse!), because all people regardless of their nationality or social standing see its worth as a useful object to be utilised. Yet despite many moments of the horse being given reaction shots and slightly too anthropomorphised behaviours, its tragedy is that it will never be able to cross that communication barrier and be able to bring the warring parties together on its own, but has to rely on the silly human beings to get past their manufactured conflicts and rediscover their shared compassion using the animal as a vehicle for otherwise unacceptable (even unpatriotic) feelings. In some ways this is probably the closest that Spielberg may get to a Bressonian film, though it is in no way as sparse and ascetic in style as Bresson!

And yes the goose felt like a wacky animal companion too far (showing how it would not take too much to push this film into being in the style of Babe or Charlotte's Web), though the other horse love interest was rather pushing it too! But then if I could manage White God, I could also manage a burgeoning yet tragic equine romance here! I also generally agree on the first section of the film being the most heavy handed, though Peter Mullan and in particular Emily Watson were fine in their roles (Watson most surprisingly so, as she portrayed a very similar matriarch character full of homilies in fantastical but similarly themed The Water Horse a number of years before War Horse, which is a film that I found incredibly irritating in every respect!)

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