Shooting the English countryside in the romanticised manner of the Deep South in Gone With the Wind, Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski conjure a sweeping, tear-jerking epic in which broad strokes and grand gestures speak volumes, substituting visual verbosity and musical overstatement (John Williams in full nostril-flaring form) for the first-person equine narration of the novel. In this respect it succeeds rather brilliantly. Rather, it's an attempt to approach the violent absurdities of human conflict (an area in which co-writer Richard Curtis has previous form) in a manner that will engage kids too young for 15-rated splatter but old enough to appreciate troubling themes of tragedy, pathos and redemption. No, this is not a four-legged revisiting of the beach scenes from Saving Private Ryan, which portrayed the horrors of war in shockingly visceral form.
Yet to complain that this nostalgically cinematic adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's bestselling book (and feted stage adaptation) is somewhat soft around the edges is to forget that the source story was specifically aimed at younger readers. Admittedly neither understatement nor brevity has ever been Spielberg's strong point, hence the much repeated joke: War Horse walks into a bar, barman says: "Why the long film?" A whinnying chorus of such dismissive jeers greeted the arrival of War Horse (2011, DreamWorks, 12) late last year, with some predictably sniffy manure being thrown at this most populist auteur's emotional Grand National.
A mong the charges most regularly levelled at Steven Spielberg is that his movies are over-egged puddings that trade in rank melodrama and infantilising sentimentality.
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