Expected more

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Slaughterhouse Five, a loud but one of a kind movie. My review on the movie version of Slaughterhouse Five is slightly different from Vincent Canbys movie review. Vincent and I agree on one thing only, and that's when he says "It's about the epic travail of Billy himself, through marriage, childhood, nervous breakdown, death and war" (The New York Times, 1). Billy's life revolves around all the obstacles he has faced and all the hardships he has seen throughout his experience in the war. His life is complicated and everyone has a hard time understanding him. Billy has reached a point in the war where he doesn't care anymore. I've read the book before hand, where the author says "Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways" "They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war" (Vonnegut,128). Billy could die any second, but he doesn't care because he has already seen everything he could possibly imagine by being in this horrible war! Billy's time travel keeps reminding him of his past, and as much as he wants to forget about it he cannot, which leaves him hopeless. These flashbacks aren't fully allowing him to be happy. I couldn't even be happy if I was constantly reminded of people dieing in such a horrible war. This is a film that's different than what you typically see today. For instance, the acting is terrible in this film because there were specific scenes where the acting just wasn't believable. The movie was in such a rush that you weren't able to understand how the characters actually felt. It didn't go into much detail as I was expecting especially regarding the death of Valencia and Tralfamadore. Because this movie is so old, the editing and cinematography was poor quality such as the scene where the light is coming towards Billy to send him on his way to Tralfamadore. The stars from the sky and space looked really fake which lost my attention at times. Some of the major components in this film to me was when Billy gets into a plane crash, and there's a scene when Valencia loses her mind and starts driving reckless because she is so hurt that her husband has been in a crash. She gets in several car crashes and even gets chased by the police. All she is concerned about is her Billy, she isn't thinking straight and all she is hoping for is Billy being okay. Then we find out Valencia dies from carbon monoxide poisoning an hour later. I think this has put a toll on Billy and has really reached his level of depression which is how he ends up in Tralfamadore. Tralfamadore is a place where Billy is finally accepting his life for what it is, its his escape, and its his only way for happiness because he has nothing left. The film really opened my eyes and made me realize that Billy wasn't a crazy man, he was just a person who has been through a lot and wants to forget his past. Being millions of miles away in a place called Tralfamadore, is something he needed to do in order to see the light. He has lost everything, and once he see's that Montana is in his presence makes everything better. He has always been attracted to Montana, and when she tells Billy she loves dogs, he likes her even more because Billy loves dogs himself. Valencia didn't like dogs, so the fact that Montana does, he has this instant attraction. I admire the fact that no matter who doesn't believe Billys time travel experiences, he doesn't let anyone brainwash him into thinking it's not true. He truly believes everything that has happened to him is real. Slaughterhouse Five is not just about time travel, it's more than that. Its about his lifestyle, his family, his marriage and the hardships of a war that has traumatized its people. Billy is a man that has been through a lot in life and still manages to find his happiness that he deserves. Even if that means being somewhere, where nobody knows you. Just you and a fresh start which is what he calls, Tralfamadore. Billy Pilgrim is often misunderstood. He is actually a good guy who isn't as crazy in the movie as I thought he would be. His character is so hard to read at times, that you wouldn't understand it until you actually see the film. You'll never really know what Billy is thinking, he doesn't really like talking about his feelings and I think he doesn't like talking about his feelings because nobody believes anything he says anyway. He doesn't feel the need to explain himself to the people around him, he is tired of receiving the negativity from his family about how crazy he sounds. The problem with this film, is that a lot of people won't be able to understand why the movie keeps going from present to flashbacks. This is a movie that people have to pay attention to in order to understand it. If you are a person that doesn't like movies at a fast pace then I would recommend only reading the book.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)Slaughterhouse-Five, by Oscar Award-winning director George Roy Hill, does a beautiful job of visually depicting the incredibly bizarre, guiltily comical, and thought provoking work of its literary counterpart by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy Pilgrim, a nothing-out-of-the-ordinary World War II veteran played by Michael Sacks, recounts his, and subsequently Vonnegut's, experiences from the war, particularly the horrific fire bombing of the German city of Dresden. The characters of Pilgrim's overweight wife Valencia (Sharon Gans), son Robert (Perry King), and daughter Barbara (Holly Near) all help to create the idea of a normal American family, unmarred by the atrocities of war. Billy's seeming lunacy is a stark contrast to their normalcy. Both the film and book travel through different times of Billy's life, due to his obsession with the Tralfamadorian concept of time, and also his attempt to cope with traumatic experiences by revisiting past events. Although dramatically "time-tripping" through three general periods of time, the movie does manage to convey a chronological progression of happenings, escaping from past stressful or violent circumstances to dwell in more peaceful or happier times in the present. In the war, Billy, then serving as a chaplain's assistant, is captured behind enemy lines during the famous Battle of the Bulge, and becomes a prisoner of war. He and the fellow P.O.W.s, including fatherly Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche), vulgar Roland Weary (Kevin Conway) and bloodthirsty Paul Lazarro (Ron Leibman) are shuffled into a German prisoner of war camp, and then packed like animals into train cars bound for Dresden, Germany. Once in Dresden, they are introduced to their new home, and the novel's namesake, Slaughterhouse-Five, an abandoned slaughterhouse sixty feet underground. Throughout the movie, one may observe that much of the music used is upbeat classical music, a stark contrast to the brutal background of war. The entire soundtrack consists of six pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, which created what felt to me like an ironic tone. The music helps to transfer over Vonnegut's feeling of uncomfortableness that he creates in the novel. Also in the movie there are scenes where the sounds from one scene of Pilgrim's life are imposed on or intertwined with the sounds from another time. One instance of this is near the very beginning of the film when Billy sits at a typewriter, documenting his experiences on Tralfamadore. Each plunk of his finger on a key reverberates as a sharp gunshot and as he continues to type the sounds transform into an entire war scene and we have time-tripped into Billy's past. Right off the bat, I was wary of a film version of such a hauntingly strange novel, but after watching it I feel that George Roy Hill really managed to accurately create an incredible film based off an equally incredible book. Superior acting, a beautiful sound track, and thought- provoking characters and situations all combine to create a film like no other.

On December 22, 1944, during the sixth day of the Battle of the Bulge, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a 22-year-old battalion scout with the 423rd Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, was captured (along with 7,000 of his comrades) by advancing German panzer forces. As a P.O.W. he was subsequently sent to Dresden, "the Florence on the Elbe." Though the city, an ancient cultural center, had no military installations or air defenses, the Allied High Command decided to firebomb it, presumably as payback for the German bombing of Coventry earlier in the war. In three separate air raids on February 13-14, 1945 (ironically Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday) hundreds of RAF and USAAF bombers dropped more than 700,000 phosphorous bombs on Dresden's 1.2 million defenseless civilians (its population nearly doubled by refugees fleeing Breslau just ahead of the Russians). The resulting firestorm, reaching temperatures nearing 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, obliterated 1,600 acres in the center of the city and incinerated more than 135,000 people. One of only seven Allied POWs in Dresden to survive the bombing, Vonnegut was assigned to corpse recovery and burial detail. The overwhelming horror he experienced in Dresden would haunt him for the rest of his life, indelibly coloring his view of life and all his work as a fiction writer. Indeed, the trauma of Dresden was so great that Vonnegut could not write about it directly for more than twenty years. After returning to Dresden on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, Vonnegut finally wrote 'Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death' (Delacorte, 1969), a powerful, fatalistic anti-war novel that blends fact, fiction, and science fiction in inimitable Vonnegut fashion. Though a critically acclaimed National Book Award winner and a bestseller, 'Slaughterhouse-Five' also garnered considerable controversy, allegedly for its frank language and sexual references, but more probably because it contradicted the established mythology of WWII as "The Good War" by focusing on an irrefutable Allied war crime of truly monstrous proportions. Three years after the novel's publication director George Roy Hill ('Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid') brought out a film version scripted by novelist-screenwriter Stephen Geller ('Pretty Poison') that is remarkably faithful to the literary text. The movie stars Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, a passive, mild-mannered optometrist of Illium (Ithaca, NY—Vonnegut attended Cornell) New York who somehow becomes "unstuck in time," i.e., he spontaneously finds himself bouncing between past, present, and future moments of his life. The signal event of his past is, of course, the Dresden firebombing. In some other moment Billy is abducted by a race of space aliens and taken to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is studied and then compelled to mate and have a child with Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine), another kidnapped earthling who just happens to be a voluptuous movie star. Absurd as it sounds, the abrupt jumping between these three scenarios—Dresden, postwar suburban America, and another planet—allows book and film to evocatively represent the Dresden atrocity, satirize the emptiness of post-war American consumer culture, and philosophize about war, human nature, and the meaning of life in general. A moderate hit at the box office—despite going head-to-head with 'The Godfather'—'Slaughterhouse-Five' won the Jury Prize at Cannes but received no Oscar nominations. Usually disappointed with film adaptations of his work, Kurt Vonnegut judged George Roy Hill's film an "artistic success." VHS (1998) and DVD (2004).

An extremely loyal interpretation of the classic Vonnegut novel that skirts the issue of explaining its complicated premise by way of a quick typewriter scene. Seeing it on-screen somehow makes everything seem less surreal than it was in print, even when the scene randomly shifts from a Nazi POW camp to a sharp, sparsely-decorated single room apartment on the surface of an alien world. Really just a handful of loosely-related tales from the protagonist's life, it's four distinct scenes tied together by jarring moments of deja vu and a strange, out-of-step sense of humor. A curious adventure, if only due to the sheer absurdity of its most profound scenes, it fails to stand out in any other meaningful ways. It's more straightforward and matter of fact than the book, and lacks many of the wry grins and quirks that made the original work stand apart. What works in print doesn't always translate so literally to the screen.