Review of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) by Michael D — 09 Apr 2013

Perhaps George Roy Hill could dream of adapting a Kurt Vonnegut novel to film, but to take Vonnegut out of it while doing so is guaranteeing failure.

When I see the movie, I remember this quote: "There are no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.". Slaughterhouse Five is not the story of Billy Pilgrim and his struggle with being "unstuck in time", but rather, it is a former-soldier-now-writer's recollection of the war and his reaction to a world that's eating itself alive.

Without Vonnegut's guiding voice, the story and characters feel thin and purposeless, unsure of what tone to convey. The acting can generally be called bland or caricatured. Having said that, Hill's more sympathetic interpretation of Pilgrim's story contains enough wit and heart to remain watchable. It's a fine alternative to the somewhat cold approach to these sections in the novel. The scenes that show Dresden before and after its destruction are perhaps the most well-made in the film. Simple but effective images of lives lived and then decimated. Prague, standing in for this lost city, looks incredibly beautiful.

Other than that, this is a hollow shell of an adaptation, running through a set of pre-written scenes without much of a philosophy to support it. So it goes.