Because this is getting insanely long and disgustingly rambly, I'm breaking it up into parts. In the last review there was much rambling and cynical side comments until Sherlockstache (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Red-Haired Loki (Tom Hiddleston) showed up. Cue suddenly getting drawn into the movie...so here goes again.
Last time we left off with Sherlockstache and RHL getting killed in a heroic charge against Germans with Gatling guns. *sniffles* Joey and his buddy Topthorne (a big black horse that used to belong to Sherlockstache) are captured by the Germans, and the story shift to a pair of brothers in the German army. The brothers take the horses and use them to pull an ambulance, thus saving said horses from being shot. (There's a scene where it's shown that Joey's ability to take a harness is what saves their lives. Joey shows Topthorne to let the humans put the collar on, and I felt the cynicism creeping up again.)
The German brothers are separated when the younger is told to go with the rest of the company to the front lines. Big Brother won't hear of that and rides up after the company on Joey and Topthorne, steals his brother from the marching lines of men, and they desert.
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| Don't they look young and innocent? Well TOO BAD, they're gonna DIE!! *falls over and flails* |
(The brothers reminded me a tiny bit of Ed and Al from Fullmetal Alchemist in their interactions with each other. Just a bit.)
They ride for hours, hide out in a windmill, and get caught by their commanding officer a few hours later. They're executed for desertion (granted, I didn't see that coming and was rather sad at that new development), and the horses remain hidden in the windmill. The next day they're discovered by a girl, and the story slows WAY down.
See, as the movie goes on it's apparent that the horses are just a rabbit-trail of taking the story in contact with other people. And it's an interesting look at a war when it's seen from a variety of people's eyes (and via the horses--it's kinda like Black Beauty in WWI in that respect), but this girl's story is just distracting. And maybe it's just me...but I find her highly annoying. She has this weird love/hate relationship with her grandfather (her parents are dead, as it's revealed later) that consists of her constantly nagging and scolding at him. Maybe she's supposed to be endearing...but I just found her obnoxious. They're also apparently now in France, and at this point I stopped trying to figure out where they were and how they could have gotten from point A to point B in such a short time.
Anyway. A long story short the horses are confiscated by some more Germans and forced to pull war machines. There's much in the way of explosions, shelling, and a sympathetic German who keeps trying to take care of the horses as best he can. Most of the horses pulling the machines are dying or on the decline from lack of food and being pushed so hard. I appreciated the grittiness of the front-line reality--I mean, I'm not happy to see deaths onscreen be they man or beast. But I'd rather have a story be believable than be required to suspend disbelief all the time.
Oh, another point of belief-suspending: there's a brief scene where a horse drops from exhaustion while helping pull a giant gun up a hill. The horse is shot where he lies, and three guys are able to pull it out of the way easily. I'm sorry, but horses are usually buried where they drop because they weigh over half a ton...3 guys wouldn't be able to budge a dead horse. But I digress.
The story jumps between the horses and Albert and his friend at this point (apparently a year or so has passed and they were able to join the army? I don't know, the pacing has played to much merry havoc so far.). There's more front-line no-man's-land action in the form of men and boys running out of trenches and getting mowed down almost immediately.
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| But hey, they have bagpipes and that's all that matters. |
I started having flashbacks of 'Gallipoli' at this point...now THERE'S a movie that made me angry and tearful. Sigh.
Albert and his friend make it to the opposite trenches, where they find no one living to oppose them. There are bodies of Germans (presumably) scattered all over the place, all wearing gas masks. I was actually wondering if they were playing dead and going to rise up and overpower the Brits...because I don't care who you are, that would have been creepy.
Instead they all get gassed...and the story cuts back to Joey and Topthorne. (You don't see any of the Brits die, so it's safe to assume that they live.) The sympathetic German is leading Joey and Topthorne on another forced march, when Topthorne stops and lays down. He'd been limping for quite some time, and dies quietly while the German and Joey try to get him up. The German is dragged away by people telling him that the enemy is coming and they need to get out of there--he yells for Joey to run, but Joey is too busy nudging Topthorne in an attempt to get him up.
(Gah. Okay, that was pretty sad, because I know that some horses really do that when they have a buddy die. *sniffles*)
Joey gets chased by a tank--sort of. I mean, he's in a wide ditch surrounded by barbed wire, so there's no where for him to go. At this point the tank also apparently runs over Topthorne's body (!!!). I mean, it's not implied or seen, but one moment the horse is there next to Joey and the next moment the tank comes rumbling where Joey was standing. I might have yelled something about 'adding insult to injury' at this point. *coughs*
So Joey--prepare to suspend disbelief again, because there was room for him to run around the tank--runs and jumps on the top of the tank (attack of the CGI horse!), runs over it, and takes off in a blind panic through the front lines. He gets tangled in the barbed wire of no-man's-land--and yes, I was cringing. Barbed wire is nasty stuff, man. But he miraculously just gets tangled up and doesn't have the hide totally stripped from the muscle like I was expecting (along with lacerated tendons, punctured eyes, etc. You DON'T mess with barbed wire in real life. But then they probably couldn't have made it a PG-13 movie.).
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| That IS still pretty scary-looking through. |
Joey struggles for a bit, then settles down with an attitude of 'death take me, please'. Some Brits looking over their trenches with periscopes notice that there's a horse out there, and start trying to cluck him over to their side. (They can't tell that he's tangled in wire yet.) The Germans on the other side hear the clucking, notice Joey, and start whistling. There's a brief scene of clucking and whistling as each side tries to get Joey's attention, then a Brit notices that he's tangled in barbed wire. He calls for a very tense truce by way of a white flag and makes his way out in the middle of no-man's-land, get to Joey, and realized that he doesn't have any wire cutters.
Enter a German from the other side, wielding wire cutters. They banter uneasily back and forth a bit about the state of the trenches while cutting the wire, get Joey out, and flip a coin to see which side gets to take the horse.
I'm going to pause here for a moment, because I think this was one of the best scenes in the movie. It's uneasy and tense in one way, but quiet and calm in another (and not so schmaltzy as some of the other scenes have been). It's hard to explain...though after they get Joey out I had to suspend disbelief concerning the superficial wounds. I had a horse catch her shoulder on a bit of wire fence once, and she peeled back a huge flap of skin down to the muscle. Look at a horse wrapped in barbed wire struggling, and I'm trying to imagine the peeled effect across the entire body. It's not a pretty thought. *shudders*
Back to the movie...the Brit wins the coin toss, and he takes his prize back to the trenches. Cut to Albert being treated in a hospital--he's blindfolded from the effects of the mustard gas--and as he's lying down listening to people whisper about the random horse found in the trenches Joey is led past in the background. Yay for suspense!
So the doctor says to shoot the horse because he's too badly injured, Albert whistles for Joey and comes stumbling over to protect his horse, they find out it's Joey because Albert describes him while blindfolded, yada yada. Very heartwarming and all that.
A very long story short, both Joey and Albert get home safely and they live happily ever after bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.
My opinion? This reviewer said it pretty well: "This is a standard horse movie about projecting human ideals, emotions,
and symbolism onto animals, with a decent war movie sandwiched in the
middle." It's long, a bit scattered, with schmaltz on the side and some good gritty scenes. And it had Sherlockstache and RHL in it, though I think they should have stuck around for the entire movie instead of just 10 minutes. *grumbles*
In conclusion, I probably spent way too much time babbling about this movie and not really saying anything original. I need to work on reviewing stuff.
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