War Horse (BD version)

[madmac]

I watched this film on Blu ray the other day and liked it very much!. Sound a cinematography was excellent, as you would expect from a Speilberg film.

The only thing that got me was that the Americans had crude swords and musket style guns and the Germans had Machine guns and cannons, morter etc.???. I mean, what's up with that?. First off, I didn't even think that there were machine guns back then??. If there were, why would the Americans not have them too?. Sending solder's out to cross a field that was being riddled with machine gun fire is just plain stupid!!??.

That being said, the whole idea of the horse and the solder's attachment to it and all the pain and misery that it went through was touching.....So was the ending as well.

Well worth a watch.......Once !!!

8/10 for a good story and fabulous sound and picture quality !! :T

[George Bellefontaine]

Pretty good film. But I did feel it dragged at times. I'm an animal lover so I had a hard time with some scenes. One watch was enough for me.

[madmac]

Pretty good film. But I did feel it dragged at times. I'm an animal lover so I had a hard time with some scenes. One watch was enough for me.

Like they always say at the end of these types of films....."No animals were harmed during the making of this film". Humane society and such ???? Huh??.....They tied up a horse in barbed wire!!. How the hell do you do that without harming the horse???.....hummm????. 8O

[Ovation]

Clever special effects--the horse was not harmed.

As for weapons, the British (not the Americans) did not have muskets (the rifled bore had been around for over a century by that point--no one used smooth-bore muskets in the First World War). However, machine guns, while present, were not hand-held portable devices and they were not easily displaced. Also, while they joined the war in 1917, the US had a very small army with less than state of the art equipment in the First World War. Conscription boosted its size but the technology leaders in military terms in that period were Germany and Britain (and Britain's best technology was naval).

As for dashing across a field against a machine gun position--it was standard military doctrine at that time that force of numbers would overwhelm firepower (this was the last war where that doctrine was applied in such fashion and with such rigidity). Military institutions are very conservative (in the resistant to change sense, not necessarily in the political sense) and it takes a lot of time for them to adapt to new technology and tactics. In more recent times, adaptation has been swifter, but in the First World War, most of the senior commanders--those who dictated broad strategy and tactics--had first become soldiers before the invention of such things as machine guns and mechanized vehicles. Moreover, no military had been involved in such a large scale war in living memory (the Napoleonic wars had been the most recent in terms of scale and they were 100 years or more in the past). There was too little understanding of the devastation that modern technology (modern for their day) could cause.

[stuofsci02]

I watched this film on Blu ray the other day and liked it very much!. Sound a cinematography was excellent, as you would expect from a Speilberg film.

The only thing that got me was that the Americans had crude swords and musket style guns and the Germans had Machine guns and cannons, morter etc.???. I mean, what's up with that?. First off, I didn't even think that there were machine guns back then??. If there were, why would the Americans not have them too?. Sending solder's out to cross a field that was being riddled with machine gun fire is just plain stupid!!??.

That being said, the whole idea of the horse and the solder's attachment to it and all the pain and misery that it went through was touching.....So was the ending as well.

Well worth a watch.......Once !!!

8/10 for a good story and fabulous sound and picture quality !! :T

Ummmm..... Time to go a watch again. Those weren't Americans (US didn't join the war until 3 years in)... It was the British army in the movie. And back then machine guns were big and heavy.. If you were attacking you wouldn't necessarily be able to use machine guns.. Especially for an ambush..

[George Bellefontaine]

I'm sure the animals weren't hurt. The implication of animal suffering was what bothered me.

Paul, it's hard to beat you when it comes to history.