The problem with War Horse is right there in the title. It isn't Person in a War who Owns a Horse or People, War, and Horses. It's War Horse. It is, quite literally, a movie about a horse which finds itself in a war - WWI, to be precise.
The problem is that horses lack moral agency. They can't grow. They can't choose to become better horses. They can only react to their experiences. Consequently, they make for lousy cinematic protagonists. In this film, the horse passes from owner to owner, from Englishman to German to Frenchman and back again, but so what? We don't spend enough time with the various owners to invest in them and it's impossible to invest deeply in a horse.
So that leaves us watching the film as a technical exercise. Oh, it's horrible. The zoom-in after zoom-in on the faces of various players while saccharine-sweet orchestral music swells and swells and swells. The compositions and set pieces that recall a technicolor version of How Green Was My Valley, had that movie been nigh-unendurable. The screenplay that sets up one overblown cliffhanger after another for a horse that is, in the end, just a horse.
Unquestionably, Steven Spielberg ranks among the finest American film makers. Even the best, however, can fail occasionally. War Horse represents such a failure. I just don't know if it's possible to make a compelling film about a creature that lacks self-awareness.
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