The official trailer for Steven Spielberg’s sure-to-be-Oscar-contender War Horse has arrived. Based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel of the same name, the film is set against the backdrop of World War I and follows the extraordinary friendship between Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and his horse, Joey. The two are separated but their fates continue to intertwine over the course of WWI as Joey is sold into the British army and sent off to serve on the battlefields of France.
Earlier this month the stage play adaptation took home five Tony awards, including Best Play. Reporting on the play’s Tony win over at BlackBookMag, Ben Barna seems quite confident the film is going to find similar success at the Oscars, declaring it a “lock to pick up a Best Picture nomination” and after the Tony wins saying it is now the “odds-on favorite” to win Best Picture. Bold Ben… bold.
Barna also adds the following statement:
[The] opening 27 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, when the allied troops storm the beaches at Normandy, remains some of the most visceral and brutally realistic filmmaking we’ve ever seen. There’s a part in War Horse where the title character finds himself in so-called No Man’s Land, that hellish purgatory between the enemy trenches on the WWI battlefields, and we’re jonesing to see what he can do with that kind of terror. Anyway, let the Oscar forecasting begin!
Wow, Ben sure seems to have confidence in his Oscar prognostication abilities, but it is also hard to disagree with him given Spielberg’s history.
War Horse doesn’t boast a cast of major Hollywood draws, but I suspect you’ll recognize the majority of the names which include Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, David Thewlis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Graham, Tom Hiddleston, Niels Arestrup, David Kross, Rainer Bock, Nicolas Bro and Robert Emms.
Check out the trailer below and tell me if you agree with Ben or if you aren’t quite ready to hand the Oscar to Spielberg’s film just yet. Just think, should War Horse take home a bunch of hardware this Oscar season Spielberg is following that up with Lincoln next year… He also has The Adventures of Tintin this December, which is to say the man is working his ass off.
From director Steven Spielberg comes War Horse, an epic adventure for audiences of all ages. Set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during the First World War, War Horse begins with the remarkable friendship between a horse named Joey and a young man called Albert, who tames and trains him. When they are forcefully parted, the film follows the extraordinary journey of the horse as he moves through the war, changing and inspiring the lives of all those he meets — British cavalry, German soldiers, and a French farmer and his granddaughter — before the story reaches its emotional climax in the heart of No Man’s Land.
The First World War is experienced through the journey of this horse — an odyssey of joy and sorrow, passionate friendship and high adventure. War Horse is one of the great stories of friendship and war — a successful book, it was turned into a hugely successful international theatrical hit that is arriving on Broadway next year. It now comes to screen in an epic adaptation by one of the great directors in film history.
