Reading Kurt Vonnegut's novel it seems impossible to ever make this book into a movie. The story jumps back and forth and the reader becomes unstuck in time with the main character Billy Pilgram. This shifting of different periods of time is indeed the biggest problem of the movie. If you haven't read the book, you will probably get confused about what's going on. Is Billy having flashbacks? What kind of narrative is this? Still, I think George Roy Hill and Stephen Geller did a good job. They included the most important conclusions of the novel, and got the feel right with indications of humor and cynicism. Of course, the movie can in no way substitute the book, which is an essential read anyway, but it's helping you visualize Vonnegut's story. The director gloriously avoided relying on special effects that would have looked dated by now. There's a plane crash, aliens and the destruction of a whole city but we never actually see any of it. The mayhem of Dresden is shown through a comparison of the beautiful city before and after the bombing and not by having buildings collapse or people die (so it goes). I think, war captivity in Germany was portrayed as an almost innocent, carefree time, which it definitely wasn't, but maybe Hill felt that this was necessary to show how unnecessary and brutally exaggerated this attack was. See this movie as an addition to the book, it doesn't stand very well on its own. For a film that's almost 35 years old, it does hold up pretty well, however.
Review of Slaughterhouse-Five
