War Horse
I was planning on watching a DC Animation today, but just wanted to take the opportunity of being in the mood to watch something related to the World War and picked War Horse to watch instead. I must say that I didn't like the movie as much as I expected, but it was an actually interesting movie nevertheless.
First of all, I expected the movie to be about basically about this rebel horse and the boy who managed to tame it. I held to the expectation that, eventually, war struck the place where they lived and the boy would be forced into war... which did happened in the end, but not in the way that I expected. The story really is more about the horse rather than these bonds between the horse and its rider. Or maybe I should say otherwise, because I really felt that the movie lost its focus in after the first 40 minutes of the movie.
While I can't deny that there are several interesting shots of Joey and the side stories of the movie, I was somewhat trying to find some reason for certain stories to be there in the movie, like the one with the German boys... or even the one with the French girl. I felt like they tried to be touching stories, but they ended up being random things that were thrown in the movie. Maybe Spielberg attempted to tell the other points of view of the war, but it still doesn't feel that he did a job as half as good as in Band of Brothers. Or maybe I'm just too biased.
(Jesus Christ, every time I come back to Livejournal, the photos uploading system seems to get worse.)
In spite of the lack of focus of the story and of a clear purpose, the movie does get a bit better as it gets closer to the end. Maybe because it seems to have more purpose than Joey's journey through several parts of the war.
I particularly liked two parts in the movie: the one in which the horse gets stuck in the middle of the battlefield, right between two enemy trenches. That scene was kinda funny. I really hope it didn't have any deep meaning that I failed to understand.
And, of course, the part in which Joey meets its original owner. Too bad I didn't take any screenshots of that part of the movie, but THAT scene represents everything I was expecting of the movie.
Too bad I only managed to capture these scenes:
The goodbye scene. Not as sad as the re encounter, but still a nice one.
I thought that this part was awfully forced into the movie so that it could have a happy ending.
...I'm such a sucker for military homecoming scenes, urgh.
Overall, this movie is nice. Probably not going to make it for my yearly Top Ten list and it was quite far from my expectations, but it was worth watching.