( CNN ) -- Who -- or what -- is `` War Horse '' for ? Steven Spielberg 's second movie of the season is a very different kettle of fish from `` The Adventures of Tintin , '' which is unpretentious escapism aimed directly at the family audience . `` War Horse '' is his pedigree picture , the tipsters ' front-runner for the Academy Awards . But the marketing materials are also at pains to stress that this is `` an epic adventure for audiences of all ages , '' and it 's based on a children 's novel by Michael Morpungo ( by way of Nick Stafford 's acclaimed stage adaptation ) , so I guess the ideal audience would be a teenage Academy voter , a history buff with a thing for horses . Set in and immediately prior to World War I , the movie chronicles the experiences of a feisty colt , a thoroughbred who 's named Joey by the tenant farmer 's son ( newcomer Jeremy Irvine ) , who cares for him and coaxes him to drag a plough through a rock pile . Sold into the army by the boy 's drunken and penurious father ( Peter Mullan ) , Joey passes from one rider to the next : a British cavalry officer ( Tom Hiddleston ) , a German hospital orderly ( David Kross ) , a young French girl ( Celine Buckens ) , and so on , in the narrative equivalent of a relay race -- the horse being the baton . Inevitably this episodic story hits highs and lows . Spielberg invests a great deal in the first act , an agrarian melodrama shot in the rosy , romantic style that David Lean brought to `` Ryan 's Daughter . '' Mullan plays one of those proud working-class types who will outbid his landlord for a pretty horse just because he likes its spirit ( and has drunk too much spirits himself ) . The plot builds to a ploughing sequence so overwrought you would think the colt had parted the Red Sea . John Williams ' lush symphonic score is a constant presence , while Janusz Kaminski 's artful lighting is another self-conscious throwback , this time to the classical style of 1940s studio filmmaking . ( Almost as clearly as `` The Artist , '' `` War Horse '' is Hollywood pastiche , with bits and pieces of Elia Kazan and even `` Gone with the Wind '' whipped into the mix . ) The prologue evokes a rudimentary class consciousness that evaporates as soon as Joey comes into the possession of Hiddleston 's gallant cavalry captain -- whose fateful battle charge is one of the film 's most impressive flourishes , and a striking expression of another of the story 's obvious themes , the industrialization of warfare . But the movie loses its footing badly in the next two episodes , when the focus shifts away from the horse and on to his minders : two German deserters , and then a French farmer and his granddaughter . This last is an especially ill-judged interlude , and seems only to have been included as an olive branch toward any young horse-lovers of the female persuasion who may have found themselves at this war movie by mistake . The scrupulously neutral and fundamentally banal screenplay by Lee Hall ( `` Billy Elliot '' ) and Richard Curtis ( `` Love Actually '' ) reaches its nadir shortly afterward , when Joey apparently `` volunteers '' to drag heavy artillery through the mud in order to relieve a four-legged comrade he recognizes from their cavalry unit . Such blatant Disneyfication sits very strangely alongside Spielberg 's real piÃ¨ce de rÃ©sistance , a nightmarish , expressionist mad dash across the trenches into the barbed-wire hell of no man 's land . The animal 's terror and anguish is vivid and horrific , and this long sequence is reason enough to concern parents of preteens . We are promised `` no animals were harmed '' during the filming , but there 's no such guarantee for the little beasts sitting beside you . ( The film is sensibly rated PG-13 . )
` ` War Horse '' chronicles the experiences of a feisty colt , a colt named Lightning . The film is Spielberg 's pedigree picture -- a front - runner for the Academy Awards . Hard to tell who 's the target audience -- teenage film fans ?