You are going to read two newspaper reviews about the play and film War Horse.
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Read the first review.
The horses, as everyone knows, are brilliant. The real genius of this stage version of Michael Morpurgo's novel, first seen at the National in 2007, lies in the work of the Handspring Puppet Company's Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler. They have created, out of skeletal bamboo frames and internal hinges, the most plausible and expressive quadrupeds ever to have graced the London stage. But, seeing the show a second time, I became more aware of the gulf between the sophistication of the puppetry and the one-dimensionality of the human beings.
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Read the second review.
Steven Spielberg has been working in Britain off and on for 30 years now, long enough in fact to have been awarded an honorary knighthood. But a few days ago, he described War Horse, his movie based on Michael Morpurgo's children's novel about the madness of war, as his first truly British film. "After I heard the reaction last night at the Odeon, Leicester Square," he said, "I realised I'd made my first British film with War Horse. Through and through." Actually, the tradition War Horse belongs to is the Hollywood celebration of British pastoral that reached its peak during the second world war with Lassie Come Home and National Velvet. Both were movie versions of novels about lonely, lovable, innocent, working-class children passionately attached to animals in an idealised provincial England. The narrator of the novel is Joey, a near-thoroughbred stallion reared on a West Country farm by the 15-year-old Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). Nick Stafford's celebrated National theatre version uses puppets for the horses. The movie, scripted by Lee Hall, author of Billy Elliot, and Richard Curtis, our most internationally successful writer of film comedies, is a superficially realistic affair, a cross between the equine picaresque Black Beauty and All Quiet on the Western Front. Directed by Spielberg in his most self-consciously epic manner, it takes the loyal, handsome, headstrong Joey from the windswept moors of Devon through the horrors of the first world war battlefields and back home again for the grandest sunset since Scarlett O'Hara told us that "tomorrow is another day" in Gone With the Wind. War is one of Spielberg's obsessions and he seems to have engraved on his heart Wilfred Owen's celebrated declaration: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." War Horse is a series of brilliantly staged, highly charged setpieces starting with the lives of the proud, penniless Narracott family made special by the possession of Joey in a landscape aggrandised by a John Williams score steeped in Delius, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. There's a marvellous sequence when Albert and Joey transform an apparently useless stretch of stony land into a fertile field, the plough turning up the dark, waxy soil like a series of images from a Seamus Heaney poem. The final 50-odd minutes of the film are a virtual tsunami of emotional waves. In a remarkably edited sequence, Joey runs amok in no-man's-land. He ends up tangled in barbed wire, jointly attended by a British soldier from Tyneside and a German from Hamburg, like something out of Oh! What a Lovely War. This leads to a succession of small, potentially lethal crises that cumulatively strain credulity and risk parching the tear ducts. But War Horse is a fable with a high moral purpose, not a documentary, and audiences will either be overwhelmed by the impact or find themselves fighting to resist it. Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/15/war-horse-spielberg-review
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