Movie review: Steven Spielberg's 'War Horse'

In his long, justly lauded career, Steven Spielberg has made his share of bad movies: the bloated, unfunny war spoof 1941; the cloyingly whimsical romances, Always and The Terminal; the shockingly inept Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But the director has never made anything that's bad in the way of War House -- a magnificently mounted, yet utterly soulless shell of a movie; a production that seems to have been created using some sort of "Make Your Own Epic" kit.

The elements are all here for a big, David Lean-style classic -- the historical setting; the golden-lit vistas; the "serious" themes of friendship, loyalty and bravery -- but nothing quite works. If you didn't know Spielberg himself had directed it, you'd think it was made by someone doing a lousy impression of the maestro.

Based on a young-adult novel by Michael Morpurgo, which found fame via a London stage adaptation that subsequently moved to Broadway, War Horse at first seems to be just another National Velvet/ Black Stallion story of an unbreakable equine-human bond. (The adaptation is by Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, and Richard Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral.) In World War I era England, a struggling farmer named Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan) bids at auction against his landlord (David Thewlis) for an unruly horse that wouldn't seem to be of much practical use. But Ted's teenage son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) bonds with the animal, naming him Joey, and steadily teaches him to plow the fields. Cue the bouncy music by John Williams, which makes it clear that you're supposed to find this section of the film charming and inspiring.

Inevitably, though, Albert and Joey get separated, and Joey ends up on a strange odyssey through wartime France, falling into and out of the hands of a series of soldiers and civilians. At this point, the strings start swelling on the soundtrack, letting us know we're supposed to feel sad and anxious. Will boy and horse ever be reunited? Does man's warlike nature obviate any hope for humanity?

Has Spielberg ever so baldly telegraphed a movie's thematic messages and emotional shifts?

Perhaps had the director taken a more modest approach -- or, alternately, had he pulled out all of the stops and created something truly over-the-top and soaring -- War Horse might have been at least entertaining; a silly but sweet melodrama. But Spielberg gets caught in a dreadful no-man's land, treating the material far too seriously, while also putting forth a vision that feels oddly underpowered.

The battle sequences, for instance, featuring bayonet-bearing, cavalry-mounted soldiers on the one side coming up against machine guns and cannons on the other, have an oddly workmanlike feel, almost as if the director watched Barry Lyndon or his own Saving Private Ryan, and thought, "I can't top that, so there's no use trying."

Many other episodes in the movie, meanwhile, are so solemn and portentous that they turn laughable. Joey helps a pair of enlisted brothers escape from the army. (He's a symbol for pacifist resistance!). Joey brings a small measure of joy to a girl who's parents have been killed (he's a symbol for innocence lost!) Joey gets tangled in military-erected barbed-wire fence. (He's a symbol for the way man's barbarous nature destroys the natural beauty of God's universe!) Every time the movie offers a measure of quiet grace -- a shot of Joey framed against a shadowy, purple-orange sunset, say -- Williams' score pipes up again and aggressively pokes us in the ribs.

As the human hero, newcomer Irvine barely has any grasp of the character: Is Albert some sort of simpleton who connects with the horse on a primal level, or is he just a happy-go-lucky kid who doesn't want to bid adieu to his pet? (Most of the other human actors, including Emily Watson as Albert's mother, and Niels Arestrup, as one of the horses' interim keepers, barely make an impression.) Nor does Spielberg fully seem to realize the challenge of making a movie where the horse is the central character. He finds all sorts of creative angles from which to photograph the beast -- but no real way to convey the creature's personality.

It's hard to say that a movie with this much evident craft on display is a total turkey; Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's longtime cinematographer, does especially fine work here. But when a two-and-a-half-hour, would-be tear-jerker leaves you this cold and indifferent, something has gone seriously awry. Even when he's off his game, Spielberg usually gives you something to hang your hat on -- a dazzling set piece, as with the Middle Passage section of Amistad; a set of intriguingly unresolved moral questions, a la Munich; at the very least, a couple of good jokes, like in The Adventures of Tintin, his other holiday release. War Horse, by contrast, is empty to its lovely looking core.