Just saw this.
I'm surprised in a board which I presume has the usual share of John Ford worshipers, there are not more fans of this film here. There are a lot of allusions to Ford - the one that struck me most were the farm scenes similarity to the Ford sequence (which I liked a lot) in "How the West Was Won"
So anyway, for me, there was enough great stuff in this film for me to be really sad that Spielberg - as usual, ends up chickening out to the perceived demands of mainstream audiences.
There were so many beautiful moments in the film - a major complaint on that score is the film rushes through things too fast for Speilberg to make more substantial set-pieces out of promising tableaux (for instance, a cavalry charge that begins in a wheat field, that could have been AMAZING if Spielberg would have taken his time).
Having seen the play Warhorse on Broadway, I can't get too upset about the acting in the film because it was of a higher caliber (the puppeteers got the biggest applause at the end of the play).
As for relying on special effects: I am fine with that in most cases - I'd rather a special effects horse get tangled up in barbed wire than a real one.
I have no problem with a certain degree of sentiment in a tale about the bond between a person and their pet. I hope nobody here would put down "The Yearling" because its just inherently 'wrong' to make a film about such a thing.
Having seen the play and now the film, what really pisses me off is how Speilberg ends the film:
In the play (and possibly the book the film and play are based on) the boy and the horse both return home from the war as permanently crippled and give a kind of 'fuck you' to the father who is portrayed far less heroically than he is here. Even though it is still a 'happy' ending insofar as boy and horse find each other, it has a far more bittersweet and thus 'earned' feeling. That Spielberg has Joey looking completely recovered considering getting completely tangled up in barbed wire is so ridiculous as to be insulting
It is just amazing to me the way that Speilberg always somehow finds a way to tarnish even his really good films (I think Empire of the Sun is another example of this). Oh well.