[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]
In his review of War Horse for IFC.com, Matt Singer noted that "I did like one scene which is complete enough as its own unit of story and character that it could be pulled out of the film and played as its own short subject." The scene, of course, is the one in which said horse, Joey, makes a gallop for freedom but becomes hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire that separates the British and German lines. A soldier from each side comes out to aid Joey; for a moment, the Great War pauses to admit compassion — and Steven Spielberg pauses to work small.
I wish Spielberg had made a short subject, or even a trim feature, of that central moment, as it's free of everything that frustrated me about War Horse in its entirety: the insistent soundtrack that shoves us to and fro with plaintive piccolos and blatting-brass "hilarity"; the cartoonish attempts to show Joey (who is, after all, played…by a horse, and only expressive in certain ways) bonding with other horses and showing great heart and willing himself to escape and blah blah courage blah; the redundant exposition about Joey's many fine and remarkable qualities; the Saving Private Neighin' set pieces that strain to point up the horrors of war. The bit does contain continental characters speaking accented English instead of their native tongues, but that has a purpose here, at least, and isn't as Alcottsy and deadly dull as the Emilie sequence. (Or as poorly done. Top Secret! had better French accents.)
The plot, in brief: Joey is bought at auction by drunk seldom-do-well Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan, too broad) to show up his rich landlord. Joey's not a plowhorse, he's a Thoroughbred, but Ted's son Albert (the promising Jeremy Irvine) bonds with Joey immediately, and swears he can break the colt to plow and get the rocky field tilled by the deadline. After this Rocky-of-the-shire moment, Joey is basically drafted into the British army — but by an officer who appreciates the special hoof-flake and promises Albert he'll get Joey home safe. Joey befriends another horse, Topthorne; escapes from various warlike tasks; gets caught in wire; and…cures the blind? Just go with it.
I rode horses as a girl, and worked as a stablehand in high school (the horse I had charge of was a goofy little blood bay named Indiana Jones, in fact) — I wanted to like War Horse, and I went into it prepared to write off the schmaltz and soaring strings that so often go with horse movies. But it's just too long, with too many breaks for Bazooka-Joe "humor" and sick-child moralizing. I gasped at the beauty of several of the shots or sequences, like the cavalry mounting up in the tall grass, and the expert editing of the cuts between the oncoming charge and the merciless gunners getting hurdled by riderless horses; that bit in particular would have gutted me in the fourth grade.
But this isn't the fourth grade; we know Spielberg can "do this." He does it here and he does it well, but the real accomplishment from the man at this point would be resisting the urge to hold our hands every minute, or setting himself the challenge of getting it in under 110 minutes on the first cut. Hell, re-cut this one — and boot that flatulent over-closed ending. I know many other reviews have mentioned the Gone with the Wind Technicolor skies, but: seriously! It's so over the top, you almost think he's joking! But it's Spielberg; he doesn't joke.
…Except in that barbed-wire sequence, which has a lightness to the banter, and gets at the message Spielberg is trying to send almost accidentally. The horror of war isn't always the barrage; sometimes it's the silences between, as in that scene with "enemies" working together and knowing the moment must end. The scene asks little of the horse except that he remain still, a symbol (which is how they work in our culture anyway, often), and subtracts the relationship with Albert, which starts out with a naïve sweetness but soon begins to seem rather weird. It doesn't show off. There isn't a cello. It's just a little story.
War Horse is handsome to look at; like Star Wars III, I'd have liked it more with my iPod in and some Handel playing. You want a real horse tearjerker, watch yourself some Phar Lap. You'll need IV fluids by the end.
This film's Oscar chances read to me as slim; the nominations may have been a gesture of respect, but it's not tapped for Best Director, so who knows. The score is diabetic and should not win; the cinematography could, and I would not hate that victory, but I wouldn't pick it.
Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here.
Four years and a $18 million worth of Paramount's money later, Spielberg and Lucas released Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring up-and-coming action hero Harrison Ford — Han Solo in Lucas' Star Wars franchise — as the whip-cracking archaeology professor trying to keep the Lost Ark of the Covenant out of Hitler's hands. As scripted by Lawrence Kasdan, who rewrote the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, Indy was a rumpled, unshaven, refreshingly human hero, surly but decent, less like a Bond-style sexy sociopath than a Gary Cooper character in a bad mood. The combination of Ford's casual fearlessness, Lucas' gee-whiz sensibility, Spielberg's kinetic precision and costar Karen Allen's tomboy sass made the film into the year's biggest hit, a sleeper that rolled into multiplexes opposite Superman II and the latest James Bond entry For Your Eyes Only and stole their box office thunder. Raiders grossed $209 million in North America and took the "So popular that we can't ignore it" spot in the following year's Best Picture lineup. It also inspired knockoffs, including the network TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring 'Em Back Alive and the movies High Road to China, Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile. 
Spielberg didn't stint on the violent action; this was probably one the first PG movies in which a lone hero singlehandedly and bloodily eliminated scores of foes, and definitely the first in which the power of God made Nazis' heads melt, implode and detonate, spewing meat chunks into the camera. Three summers later, the even more extreme violence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the Spielberg-produced Gremlins 
Raiders was a career-redefining entry on the resumes of its major players. Ford stepped into the lead after CBS refused to release the filmmakers' first choice, Magnum, P.I. star Tom Selleck, from his TV contract, and proved he could sell tickets without a laser pistol in his hand; the film's success marked the start of a 20-year run as one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors. Ford's regular employer Lucas showed the studios that he wasn't just the
In later films we will learn that Indy has taken on the vocation of his father as a way to impress, and then one-up, the old man, a stern and distant academic. In Raiders, Indy is presented as almost a runaway kid, a grown-up Bowery Boy who doesn’t give much thought to others. He possesses the shallowness of youth, complete with the clichéd woman in every port. He’s a heartbreaker, this one.
When Indy, Willie, and Short Round come across a village, they discover all of the children have been kidnapped and forced into slave labor in the mines of the Thugee cult. In effect, the bad guys in this film have made the entire village childless, and turned all the kids into orphans by kidnapping them.
While the elder Jones didn’t literally abandon his family to pursue his obsession, we have no doubt that a lot of the time when Indy was growing up, the old man was mentally or emotionally checked-out. You can see it in the way they communicate – or more accurately, don’t communicate.
Released almost twenty years after the last Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels like a coda. Indy seems to be re-thinking his decisions, and having pangs of regret. Although the sixty-something Indy is still a snarling, leathery ass-kicker, and in what might be his surliest mood since the middle section of Temple of Doom, the movie’s overall tone is rueful and melancholy.
In Jaws Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody is the father figure to a tightly-knit summer community being terrorized by a Great White Shark. The scene where his son mimics his gestures tells us he’s a loving, good father who will do anything to keep his family – and his community – safe. 
But when the men sit around drinking and talking we learn the source of Quint’s insanity. He tells them of how he survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the naval vessel that an atomic bomb that helped the United States defeat Japan in World War II. They were ultimately successful — but the mission is famous mainly for having its crew picked off by ravenous sharks. 
The Spielberg who made Saving Private Ryan in the late 1990s was a family man in his 50s. Detractors questioned Miller’s final admonition — asking, in effect, “Well, what if Private Ryan went home and DIDN’T accomplish anything special?” But that’s really not the point of that moment. It is a purely personal, human moment between Miller and Ryan that transcends war or even politics. In Spielberg’s films, every life is worth saving, provided that the saved person goes on to continue to be – or to BECOME — a decent person, and do the best he can with the gift he’s been given. 
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg shows a father driven to near madness in the pursuit of his dream. Roy Neary exhibits the behavior of a young artist who’ll stop at nothing to make the vision in his head a reality. 
Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T. feels like a continuation of Close Encounters – and not just because the story originated in Spielberg’s daydreaming about what might have happened if one of the aliens from Close Encounters got left behind. The film’s hero, Elliott, is the middle child in a bustling suburban home guided by a single mother. The absence of the father is conspicuous, and important. At time it feels as if we’re seeing what happened to the Neary family in Close Encounters after Roy lost his mind and ran off to Devil’s Tower. 
Throughout his films you can track Spielberg’s evolving feelings about the terrors, pleasures and responsibilities of fatherhood. In Empire of the Sun, based on J.G. Ballard’s novel, the preteen hero Jim is wrenched from his family as violently as any Spielberg hero, and must learn to survive on his own. He finds an unexpected ally – a sort of Humphrey Bogart-like, scoundrel-mentor – in Basie, an American steward stranded in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. 
The human version of this element is authority. In Spielberg’s movies, evil, such as it is, always comes back to the use or abuse of power. The relative good or evil of people in a Spielberg film can be discerned by looking at how they use whatever authority they have in a given situation – how they tap into, and apply, power. This is how morality is measured. It is how good or evil is measured. In the words of WH Auden, “Evil is unspectacular and always human; And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
Both Goeth and Mister are monsters and emotionally twisted; and, evil does manifest itself — but only through characters that are morally and psychologically defeated. They’re in with the power structure set out by society; even though they’re just individuals, in another sense they ARE authority. 
Spielberg’s slave-era drama Amistad pointedly avoids giving us a single, cartoonish, Mandingo slave master that we can direct our righteous ire against. The villain is a corrupt, debased and complacent system that everyone has grown used to, and that treats humans as property – a system that must be recognized as such, and resisted. Here, as in Schindler’s List, the representatives of corrupt authority are rather bland, even borderline faceless people. They embody Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.
John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park, at first seems a charming old man who just wants to dazzle people and make them happy. But if you total up the body count of all the films in the series, he seems infinitely less adorable. Hammond is a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and Walt Disney, purveying spectacular wildlife attractions that end up killing the customers.
The UFOlogist Lacombe in Close Encounters might be the first major character in a Spielberg film that fits this description – the ally within the establishment. It is Lacombe who spies the escaped UFO obsessives heading for the Devil’s Tower but refrains from tipping off the army. It is because of Lacombe that Roy is able to don a red jumpsuit and join the other extraterrestrial pilgrims. It is because of Lacombe, a government agent, that Roy ultimately gets his wish, and walks up that ramp into the mothership.
Oskar Schindler deserves a special mention as the ultimate Fifth Column. He is a subversive infiltrator deep in the heart of the Nazi apparatus, fueled by the moral impetus to do the right thing, even though he is almost completely inscrutable, and justifies his goodness on mercenary grounds. Initially, Schindler is a cad and a dandy; an incorrigible womaniser; an exploiter of slave labour; a boorish bully; and a member of the Nazi party. 
I was the sort of kid who paid attention to movie credits, even if I didn’t comprehend them, so from an early age I was familiar with the name of 
That isn’t to say that Kahn didn’t go to the movies a lot. It was a weekend ritual for him as a teenager. “I’d go Saturday, I’d go Sunday. I’d see anything that was playing,” he recalled. For an editor who would later make films like 
Kahn stayed and got a job at Desilu. It was there that he came into contact with Dann Cahn, Desilu’s editorial supervisor. “Danny was very nice to me,” Kahn said. “I was his assistant in the office. He said, ‘Listen, if you want to get ahead in this business, you’d better get into a union.’ So he got me into the editors union.”
Twenty-three films later, it is still
Kahn didn’t mince words in explaining why his collaboration with Spielberg has been so successful: “After all, let’s be frank, I’m working with the best. There’s no doubt about it. I don’t say that because I’m with him. If I wasn’t with him, I’d say it. His memory is unbelievable. I feel I have a great memory, but he doesn’t forget. He likes me to put in temp music from other scores. He remembers the temps I put in years ago! It blows my mind. He’ll remember something. ‘Oh, you used that before!’ ‘Yeah, but it was ten years ago!’”
Language — and translation — are everything. In Close Encounters, for instance, Roy Neary tries to translate a dream vision into something he can feel and touch … and ultimately visit. Meanwhile, scientists use mathematics and puzzle logic to understand the nature of mysterious signals transmitted from space. In The Terminal, an international terminal becomes a microcosm of the world as a stranded traveler from an invented Balkan country learns to communicate with a sort of mini-United Nations of airport staff and airline employees, many of whom speak languages other than English. Spielberg’s other films feature smaller but no less significant moments of communication between individuals reaching out across gulfs of geography, language and culture. In a pivotal scene in Saving Private Ryan, a German prisoner's clumsy attempt to appeal to his Army Ranger captors' humanity saves his life. It's ultimately not the words that persuade, but the man's all-too-human desperation. 
Ironically, the truth of their human connection can only surface because of a verbal un-truth. The Israelis have convinced the PLO fighters that they're non-Jewish members of international left-wing militant groups. One PLO fighter speaks blunt political truth to the film's German-raised Mossad agent hero because he believes he's a German gentile. The Mossad agent, shielded by his false facade, speaks from the heart as well. Throughout, Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" echoes in the background, gently satirizing the endless Israeli-PLO struggle — but also suggesting a deeper connection that both men consciously deny.
The centerpiece of the movie is when the men sit around the table, drinking and talking. There’s an unspoken rivalry between the crusty old seaman Quint and the young smart-ass Hooper. They start to compare scars they’ve gotten while observing sharks. (Brody, a former big-city cop who has rarely fired his gun, has no scars.) Hooper is amused by Quint, humoring his macho posturings. Quint knows this. But Quint puts Hooper in his place when he begins to tell him how he survived the Indianapolis, the World War II vessel that delivered the Hiroshima bomb. The Indianapolis is most famous for being attacked and its crew being picked off by sharks. There are a couple of things going on in this sequence. Quint’s monologue stops the film cold and gives it a sense of drama that had been mostly absent up until that point. His story is real and is scarier than anything in the movie. That’s probably why some critics (particularly Pauline Kael) raised concerns about its inclusion in otherwise escapist entertainment. Some felt the movie was crossing a line by using a real-life tragedy in the service of an adventure story. It would seem to be exploiting the real pain of the families of those who perished or survived the Indianapolis. But for Spielberg and his contemporaries (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma), nothing was off limits. Nothing was sacred if it made for a better story. Quint’s monologue transforms the movie from an old-fashioned monster movie into something haunting. It’s why the movie has endured all these years.
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