It has now been over a month since I watched "War Horse" at an advance screening, and many scenes come quickly to mind when I reflect on the movie: first and foremost, the amazing sequence when the British cavalry attacks a German camp, swords levelled--followed immediately by the appalling slaughter of men and horses when the machine guns open up. The brutal realism of horses drawing heavy guns up mud-choked hillsides. The humanity of the rescue of the wire-festooned horse in no man's land.
This is family fare, so Steven Spielberg has spared us the blood and gore that he could have included, and he has presented British and German alike as human, with good and bad traits on both sides.
As in "Soldier of the Horse", men at war were not protrayed as saints, but neither were they bereft of human emotions.
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War Horse is getting generating a fair amount of discussion over at The Society of the Military horse site (of which I'm one of the moderators). Mostly positive, but a few negative as well. It's certainly the most noteworthy WWI film in quite some time.
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