Hold on tight: Spielberg's 'War Horse' is an emotional ride

Steven Spielberg returns the word "epic" to filmmaking with "War Horse."

I'll admit I cried.

There, I said it. I'm not too proud to admit it. If the film had been about a dog, I would never have made it through it, but horses aren't quite as close to home.

The film centers on Joey, a horse who is sold away from the family farm in England and ends up serving both the Germans and the British during the horrible human waste of World War I.

I first discovered "War Horse" in a theater in London - the same location where Spielberg found it. The stage play, based on the 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo, has large, life-sized puppets playing Joey and the other horses.

The movie uses real horses and can't match the play's craft and imagination. But the filmdoes what films can do best - suggest sweep, spectacle and reality.

Spielberg shows that he has not really grown up, and that's more to the good. The last time he showed as much emotion as he musters in "War Horse" was with "E.T.," and that was quite a while back.

Mind you, the last time I remember crying in a theater was "Lassie Come Home," but I was all of 5 years old then.

In "War Horse," there is a good deal of trauma and a reminder that death is not always the saddest thing in life and that the bond between human and animal is among the most noble treaties we make.

While "War Horse" has its emotional excesses, it also has important things to say about a world that is being transformed by machinery. The industrial revolution mechanizes war in a way that makes it easier to slaughter human beings, and, perhaps, to replace horses with tanks.

Jeremy Irvine is a bit too beautiful and too perfect to suggest a mere Devon farm boy named Albert, who loves his horse and goes on an odyssey to get him back. Emily Watson has little to do other than be matronly as his mother.

The photography by Janusz Kaminski fits the epic vistas required by the story. Sure, everything seems overproduced and less intimate than it might have been, but it's great to see a movie with such scope again.

The horse goes from life on the farm to life with a British officer, then a German soldier, then an old French farmer and his granddaughter and so on. The episodes, some of which were not in the stage version, sometimes seem isolated and unfocused.

The film is on target when it sticks to the drama of the boy and his horse.

"War Horse" is audaciously sentimental and daringly full of heart, and only the coldest of moviegoers will be unmoved. This is a film the way they used to make them - and should again.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com