From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- When Horses Were Smarter Than Men-Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.      

DVD Review

War Horse, starring horses, Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, directed by Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Pictures, 2011

What is there not to like about a movie (even if based, or maybe particularly because it is based on a children’s novel) about a man (okay, a boy starting out) and his horse, their bonding together, their trials and tribulations and their successes (if that is an appropriate term in the midst of bloody carnage).Well, nothing, nothing on this good green earth (and the slice of England portrayed in the film is a very good example of that).    

Nothing, except man getting in the way of an obviously smarter member of the animal kingdom, one Joey the horse. Why?  Well, man and horse come of age just around the time of World War I when “civilized” Europe decided that a war to end all wars (they came up a little short, about 300 plus wars somewhere on the planet short since, on that proposition) was necessary to sort things out. So England and its colonies, France and its colonies, Russia and its colonies, and German and its colonies, decided to tear up half of continental Europe to see who the king hell king was anyway. And this war to end all wars happened to occur at just that point when humankind had exponentially increased its technological capacity to kill, to murder, and to maim at will.    

But not at 2012 levels, so one Joey the horse got “drafted” into the war and wound  up “serving,” one way or the other, both sides as beast of burden. But modern wars are not kind to those military whizzes who lived (pardon the expression) in the “horse and buggy era,” in the thinking of the last war, and so produced sickeningly destructive trench static warfare complete with barbed wire, maddened gas attacks, cavalry charges against fixed machine gun positions and used horse, including Joey (and his horse friend) to lug artillery into position. Madness, pure and simple.   

And that is where Joey, unlike the Brits, Germans, etc. showed he was smarter than all those guys who knowingly and hopelessly kept going up over those bloody trenches without a murmur. When he had the chance he ran like hell, he “deserted” like any sane person would. And lived to tell about it (or have it told). Chalk one up for the horse set. And see this film as we near the one hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I in 1914.