I saw War Horse this morning.

Spoilers.

I’m doubtful that this will reflect most people’s opinions of the film, so I think it’s important to mention, firstly, that I’ve never ever liked a film starring an animal so I probably didn’t watch this from a completely fair perspective. I had a fair inkling that I wasn’t going to come out as a massive fan of it.

… I didn’t like it.

Although the directing was great, the sound was superb, the acting (mostly) was good, I felt that there were really substantial weaknesses in the narrative that jeopardized the film as a whole. The narrative was almost that of a fairytale, with charms of luck and senses of fate and destiny drawing the owners of the horse together and the horse eventually back to its original owner. It was felt destined to happen. Had this been about something less intense than WWI, I wouldn’t have had an issue with it, but I found that, actually, the harsh inhumanities of the war were juxtaposed against this almost magical horse. It felt insensitive.

This is supposed to be a harsh, gritty representation of war. I had even heard whispered comparisons between the No-Man’s-Land sequence to the D-Day beach scenes from Saving Private Ryan. Although I agree that one of the sequences was outstandingly good, everything was just overshadowed by the flaws of its narrative. It led to cheesy, weak dialogue and unrealistically profound conversations which just irritated me. To imply some sort of governing fate or destiny over the crimes committed in WWI seems to disregard all that we honour and remember, and even what we learn from it.

Some of the stories were considerably weaker than others, leading to sections where the horse is literally the only interesting component in the diegesis, and, as well as the horse performed, it wasn’t enough to carry a narrative of that magnitude on the screen. I also got a little frustrated with the overly humanised horse, responding directly to speech its never heard before as if it’s somehow got a natural grasp on the English language. Again, as impractical as it would have been to show the more arduous process of training a horse, this natural acumen to understand its original owner didn’t seem enough of an emotional attachment to lead the character to enlist, seemingly, purely for the act of finding his horse. It seemed like they ploughed a field together, raced a car, and then decided that they must be friends for life.

I’ve got to reiterate, though, I’m only criticising the narrative. The film, as a whole, was still good. There was some excellent directing and some scenes that were strikingly well put together. The music, as usual with John Williams, was a particular highlight. And the natural sense of progression between the stories, sometimes expected, sometimes catching the audience by surprise, was handled with sophistication.

I just can’t get  my head around this animal becoming the fairytale of the war. There’s only so far you can go to hide from what really happened, and this just took it a little too far. Overall, a good film that I’d still recommend to most people, especially because I sense that I’m in a particularly niche minority in not being a fan. And the scene where the soldiers go into over the top and into No-Man’s-Land is sure to go down as one of the best representations of WWI in film history.