Sploich's Movie Review of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

Sploich Reviews Spirit: SotC (2002)
Sploich - wrote on 03/06/11

On June 23, 1865, the very last force of the Confederate Army surrendered to the United States, ending the Civil War. That force was a tribe of Cherokee indians in Oklahoma. There were in fact many American Indians fighting on both sides of the Civil War. The man who wrote up the terms of surrender for the Confederacy was a general and an American Indian. All of these facts are completely ignored in the history-destroying film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

The movie is about a stallion who wants nothing more in life than to keep doing what he's doing. This plan is interrupted when he gets himself captured by Confederate soldiers. He then befriends an American Indian and a mare as he tries to escape the clutches of a general who apparently thinks searching the countryside for one horse is more important than fighting the war he is currently in.

I'm a history major. I make it my job to do two things in life: Write film reviews and learn history. This makes it extremely difficult for me to watch a film like this, where virtually every situation is based severely on a misinterpretation or a downright lie about history. In this film, the Confederacy is portrayed as a group of evil thugs who kidnap horses and indians just to be mean (I guess that's better than randomly killing black people, another thing they didn't do). The indians are portrayed as peaceful, land-loving humans who wouldn't harm a fly (again, American Indians were an incredibly important factor in the Civil War, fighting as both Union and Confederate soldiers). Everything about the humans is ridiculously manipulated in order to serve the purpose of the message of the story, and that's probably my single most hated trait in any film.

History aside, this movie is just a mess. For some reason Matt Damon narrates the entire film as the main horse, since the horse doesn't speak for himself. The narration is very irritating and utterly pointless. The movie probably would have had a much bigger emotional impact if there wasn't somebody explaining everything all the time. The animation is nothing special and the score is less than subpar. Bryan Adams, a musician and "shockingly" a social activist, wrote most if not all of the songs that make up most of the film's soundtrack, and pretty much every one of them is stupid and boring. The lyrics are very generic, with nothing to say other than "I've just got to be free" and "we should treat everybody the same," etcetera. It never gets unbearable but it does get really annoying. The music alone is uninteresting, though I blame this a little more on the film's score composer, Hans Zimmer.

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is the kind of movie that I can't stand watching and Hollywood can't stop making. I don't think there's anything more important in life than history, and films like these, where they completely ignore historical fact in favor of a political message, drives me absolutely insane. I hate this movie.

EDIT: I realize it seems that the only reason I really hated this movie was because it was historically inaccurate. First of all, I do realize that Confederate soldiers did in fact hunt American Indians by command. That doesn't change the fact that this movie is very very stupid. What I hated the most about this movie though was the narration and the fact that it was incredibly boring and generic. I just wanted to clear that up.