Before I begin: I realize Steven Spielberg’s War Horse was a widely-acclaimed film that was nominated for multiple Oscars. By and large, people loved it. However, there was an incredibly vocal contingent on the Internet that outright hated the film. This mystifies me. This absolutely, positively, mystifies me. I understand why some may be turned off by the film’s more sentimental elements, but I can’t comprehend why so many would react as if this film invaded their homes and killed their entire families. Greeting such a skillfully done and well-meaning film with anger just doesn’t register for me. Personally, I loved War Horse. It wound up on my top 10 list for 2011. It isn’t the greatest Steven Spielberg film of all time, but it’s rather brilliant in the way it takes a well-worn topic—war is hell, y’all!—and presents it in a fashion we haven’t seen before.
One of the great misconceptions people have about Spielberg is that he makes cheesy, crowd-pleasing movies with happy endings. Those people are not actually watching Steven Spielberg movies. I touched on this a bit in one of my Summer of Spielberg posts, but in reality he is great at making movies with ostensibly happy endings that actually have a lot more to them. The obvious example people use is the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which consists of a tacked-on bit where the robotic David briefly reunites with his mother in some kind of virtual reality. On the surface, it’s a happy, emotional moment. But it’s not real, and that makes it kind of tragic. You give me a Spielberg movie with a “happy” ending, and I’ll probably be able to tell you why it’s not actually that happy. War Horse may have its moments of sentimentality that many have called “cloying,” but it’s actually a very bleak look at the impossibly high cost of World War I. There may be some nice moments at the end, but we have to go through a ton of crap to get there.
Have I mentioned War Horse comes out on DVD and Blu-ray this week? Because it does, and that is the real reason I’m writing this. Probably should have said that up top. Check it out, please.
War Horse isn’t the only brutally sincere hitting the shelves of your local Target (not an ad) this week. Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo—his first film since Elizabethtown—was another film that got something of a bad rap when it came out around the holidays. I caught up with it late, and I never got around to reviewing it, but I had a whole lot of fun with it. Do I remember much about it? No. But I do remember it being an affable family film with some really touching, human moments. It’s emotional, but it comes from a real place.
That’s all for now. Suck it, War Horse haterz!
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