Tuesday, January 10, 2012

War Horse (2011)

Rating: 70%
Well now that I've made my Girl with Dragon Tattoo review, let's get on with reviewing this film.


Plot: Ted Narracott buys a young thoroughbred foal as his plowing horse for his farm. Despite the horse's apparent lack of fitness to be a plow horse, his son Albert begins to train the horse where he bonds a friendship with it and names the horse Joey. But then the farm's crops become ruined and so Ted sells Joey to the military where it becomes a war horse for a kind Captain named Nicholls.

Now while I had some pretty high expectations about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo based on it's first trailer, I thought based on the trailers to this film, that it was going to be an ultimate piece of crap. I mean the whole story about the bond of friendship between a kid and his horse just looked like the cheesiest thing ever. And it actually turns out that as far goes as the main story of the film goes, I COULD HARDLY BE ANY MORE RIGHT!!! I mean the whole time that Albert is training Joey was just so predictable that the movie started out becoming utterly boring. I mean it made it look like I should've waited until the movie is out on DVD so I could just half-watch it while playing video games or reading comics. I mean Twilight is more original than the story between Joey and Albert (oh yeah, I fricking went there!) But what saves this film is after Joey gets sold. Then the movie gets more focused on some mini-stories that are more related to what times were like back in World War I which mostly turned out to be really good stories. In a way it's a bad thing because there's so much more of these stories than they were ever focusing on Joey and Albert. So even if the main story wasn't cheesy, the movie still wouldn't really be that good because it went very far from the main story that if might be confusing for some movie watchers. But for me, I'm happy for that because at least with a horrible main story, there was all these little stories that made the movie good anyway.

Actors/Characters:
Jeremy Irvine/Albert Narracott: Well it's not like he himself did a bad just but just because of his whole story with Joey, I just really hated the character.
Tom Hiddleston/Captain Nicholls: Now him I really liked. His character really in a way is just what saved the movie for me. I didn't expect there to be any actual characters throughout Joey's experience in WWI that anyone would really care about. But then Captain Nicholls came along and I found him being this guy who becomes compassionate and decides to really look after a kid's horse during the war after his father sells the horse was extremely more interesting than what was going on between Albert and Joey.
Niels Arestrup and Celine Buckens/ Grandfather and Emilie: I liked them too.

Music: Well it was John Williams so it was good.

Editing: I thought it was nice. I personally liked the cut between the British Calvary charging and the Germans firing at them. It was just so cool how while there's the Calvary charging on one side, only the horses are passing by on the other and I thought that was pretty cool.

And that's my review for War Horse. If it's going to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, I think it's going to be one of the middle/weakest of the nominees in that category.

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