There was a time when I would greet a new Steven Spielberg film with feverish excitement but after a decade of mediocrity and disappointment I can no longer say that is true. However, even with low expectations I was not expecting War Horse to be quite so excruciatingly awful.

It is an overly sentimental and syrupy mess of a film and so revoltingly corny I almost wonder if it is an elaborate joke on the poor audience. How anybody involved could make this saccharine filled twaddle with a straight face I do not know. The first hour is, without exaggeration, one of the most overblown and downright stupid hours of a film I have seen. Not only am I appalled…

Oh my, this is terrible. How did Spielberg fall so far? It is so sickeningly schmaltzy.

The screenplay is horrendous. At what point was I supposed to care? And about who exactly? If they had chosen a specific character to latch onto I might have been able to feel a little something. But instead we get I don't know how many different storylines - all connected in some stupid way, of course - all of which mean nothing.

God-fucking-damn it, can we please have germans speaking german?! It makes no sense! At first when we meet the germans, they speak english with terribly cartoonish accents - "Ve muzt get tooo ze frrrontlaiines!" Later on, they lose the accents for a…

Holy cow! What a mess!
I haven't seen a movie that sounded so promising (regarding the director, title, composer, etc.) and turned out so hollow. Not only the story is a complete mess, but also the characters and the acting (except for the horses). It seemed to me that Spielberg tried to cover the obvious flaws of his work with a bunch of impressive shots (thx to Mr. Kaminski) and an artistic art direction.

How bad was Jeremy Irvine as Albert?! Pleeeaase? It couldn't get any worse! The story was cheesy, which would not necessarily have made it a bad movie. But this time we get a sequence of supposedly tear-jerking episodes that were so badly composed that I almost…

I went to an early Sunday morning screening of War Horse as I felt this was probably the best time of day to see it. The middlebrow wet-dream -team of Steven Spielberg and Richard Curtis did not fill me with confidence, and I wanted to give myself plenty of time to see something else afterwards if it was indeed as bad as I suspected. It was.

The film annoyed me the most in the first hour, with its patronizing take on English country life. Spielberg seems to have confused Devon with Hobbiton or a Hovis advert and much of the blame here must lie with the writer. I have long had problems with Richard Curtis’ own nauseating version of middle…