sevenhelz

is insanely unrealistic. This is entirely based on what my mother (of farming stock) has told me. Spoilers!

Firstly please note that in over two hours of film there is no evidence of any horse ever shitting or pissing. Right.

A disabled ex-soldier father on a shoddy little tenant farm buys a half-thoroughbred, unbroken colt for his son&farm, for 30 guineas - easily a good year's wage for the place - somehow winning a bidding war against his own landlord.
The son starts training the horse, never having met one before but apparently being a natural.
In order to make up the rent, the father decides to plough a rocky field and plant a turnip crop - somehow convincing the landlord to accept rent six months late. Right.
The horse has never ploughed before, nor been ridden, and is unused to weight. The plough has been out in the field and is rusty. Apparently a rainstorm softens the ground and makes it ploughable. This is theoretically possible, if it's peaty soil, but there probably wouldn't be much soil in a field like that. Even though it's manually ploughed the rows are perfectly straight; you then see the father sowing seeds very close to his body, not spreading them out, and again the plants somehow grow in perfectly straight rows.
A rainstorm somehow washes the turnips out of the soil and everyone bemoans their loss. No more crop! ...Except that they're already a decent size (especially bearing in mind that there wasn't as much forced growth/supermarket pressure to grow even-sized vegetables back in'th day) and anyway the ground's still wet and they're fucking turnips. Push em back in, they'll survive.
Why do these farmers know nothing about farming?

So the horse is taken away to battle, and a red and blue pennant that was the father's is sent with the horse, and somehow stays with the horse throughout its adventures, and is somehow still red and blue by the end. Okay. This untrained horse, which was shy not long before and has still apparently not been properly ridden, is used in a cavalry charge and doesn't bat an eye - in fact runs ahead of the rest of the horses. Okay. Apparently it (a stallion) also has a close relationship with another war horse (a stallion), and somehow they're kept together during the madness of the war, and it's a lovely little bromance in animal form. O...kay.

The horse exchanges hands a bit, fine, at some point it winds up at a mill on a fruit farm - the mill is turning despite having broken wossnames, arms, and two horses arrived there because soldiers had stolen them to desert. When the soldiers are found the horses conveniently escape notice, presumably aided by their lack of *ahem* physical telltales i.e. horse muck all over the bloody place as there would be in real life.
Soo... this is apparently some kind of fruit farm, with grandparents and a young girl whose parents died in some war at some point. Fair enough. They appear to grow strawberries and the grandad makes jam. Fairly luxurious I'd say, but whatever. Yeah so there are more soldiers coming through, nicking all the good food and such, and they don't notice the horses BECAUSE THEY ARE HIDDEN IN AN UPSTAIRS BEDROOM and obviously the horses don't eat the bedding or shit everywhere because it's the girl's bedroom and they are more genteel than that. Yup. And that barn full of hay, which fuck knows where fucking fruit farmers have got it from in the middle of a fucking war, of *course* the soldiers believe whatever shitty story they come up with to explain why they both have and should indeed keep a barn full of hay on a farm with no livestock.

So then there's some drama about the horses potentially dying; at one point some soldiers are told to shoot healthy horses and not even for meat. BUHDUH WHAT. My brain kind of shut down at this point so there may be more I've missed, but there you have it; what a load of bollocks!