First of all, the nonsense about the boring horse that can't even jump I can almost forgive, because I assume that's in the original book and play.
What most annoyed me was the saccharine style Spielberg adopted for the pastoral scenes. I have a lot of admiration for Spielberg as a director despite his frequent lapses into schmalz, but this time he waaaay overdid it.
Take the lighting, for instance. It looked fake, like studio lighting, even in the external shots. Maybe that was a deliberate echo of the stage play, I don't know. But it gave the film an unreal quality that didn't seem to fit the inherent darkness of the material (I know it's a kid's book, but it's still dark).
Please leave me my horse, he fits so well with this pastoral idyll
The father of the hero (to the right in the above screenshot), a Devonshire farmer, was a drunken failure whose stubbornness almost reduced his wife and son to beggary. Now, if rural Devon had been made to look as grim and depressing as it probably was at the time, and less like a biscuit tin, maybe the appearance of this beautiful horse would have meant something. But the whole world looked so idyllic it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen. That's why I thought Ken Loach would have done a better job directing.
Eeee but tha's a beautiful bird, our Kes
Like Vlad, I was also irritated by the scene of the horse wrapped in barbed wire in No Man's Land. But I was mostly irritated because it was the most potentially interesting and believable scene in the movie. It's not unknown for units of men in the midst of war to form close emotional attachments to animals, as mascots or totems of good luck. So when a British and German soldier awkwardly joined forces to free the horse, and then tossed a coin to decide who gets to keep it, I was really drawn in, and I thought the scene was genuinely poignant and beautifully written.
It just happens that the surrounding two hours were crap.
Yeah, I was also going to rattle on about the way it was shot, but I just ran out of energy. There is loads of stuff to pick at, like Speilberg's obvious dislike of Germans, that's worth a blog in itself...
ReplyDeleteSome of the Germans were nice. Those two brothers, and the chubby guy who loved horses, and the guy who helped free the horse. In fact that's most of the Germans.
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