In “War Horse” Steven Spielberg has made a big, weepy, melodramatic, old-fashioned war epic that gave me giant, black, soppy horse eyes as I watched it.
Time and again its expansive locales, swimmingly patriotic John Williams score, folksy character actors, cloying tearjerker plot developments and dopey comic relief moments typically involving livestock recall how John Ford would’ve done it much better in a number of his movies, and Spielberg knows it.
Perhaps more so than “Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Super 8” or even “The Artist,” “War Horse” is a throwback to Classical Hollywood in so many ways that from a modern lens the film just feels so phony and unrealistic but oh so right. Continue reading “War Horse”