Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
Genre: Drama / War
Duration: 104 minuten
Country:
United States
Directed by: George Roy Hill
Stars: Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman and Eugene Roche
IMDb score:
6,8 (14.768)
Releasedate: 15 March 1972
Slaughterhouse-Five plot
"Billy Pilgrim lives —from time to time to time…"
Billy Pilgrim is an American ex-soldier who fought during World War II. It is 1968 and his wife has passed away. A lot of people think Billy's out of his mind. He says that he does not only live in the present but also in the past and in the future. This, he says, is due to his encounter with aliens from the planet Talfamador. From the past we see Billy's time as an infantryman in Luxembourg. From the future we see Billy, who is married to his fantasy wife.
Actors and actresses
Billy Pilgrim
Paul Lazzaro
Derby
Valencia
Montana Wildhack
Barbara
Robert
Weary
German Leader
Young German Guard
Reviews & comments
shugenja
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- 706 messages
- 1686 votes
In the book, Vonnegut promises a woman that he will call it "The Children's Crusade." This, I believe, refers to the fact that in the final months of the war, only children and the elderly were fighting. All the good soldiers had long since died.
I loved the book and saw the movie right afterward. I'm disappointed, even though it's a pretty good movie. I don't think it's absurd enough or funny enough, while the book is very much like that. Furthermore, Billy is played very coldly, almost apathetically, while in the book he was constantly whining and a complete coward, looked ridiculous, and was laughed at. He was a character who always stood out and everyone wanted to like.
Plus, he was always confused when he found himself in a different time. You don't see that in the film, which makes it less compelling.
The film is somewhat more coherent than the book, and the story is quite well-crafted. But the spirit of the book, and especially the narrator with the witty remarks, is unfortunately gone. That's how things go... so it goes.
Translated from Dutch · View original
Woland
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- 4831 messages
- 3875 votes
Slaughterhouse Five struck me as one of those books that was completely unfilmable. The story of someone who, by his own admission, is "unstuck in time," jumps nonlinearly between locations and times, and who, by his own admission, is a remarkably unreliable narrator; I was very curious to see how that would play out on film.
And as it turns out, it works perfectly, and it's still a strange story. Billy Pilgrim experiences a traumatic wartime period in Dresden, where his POW camp is bombed along with the rest of the city. But he also claims to have been to the alien planet Trafalmagore, and through its non-linear time, jumps between different periods in his life. Perhaps it helped that I'd read the book before, but I still found it reasonably easy to follow, and the protagonist (Michael Sacks, apparently) does a strong job. And it's simply interesting to follow Billy Pilgrim's life (or rather, his PTSD-inspired fantasies).
Translated from Dutch · View original
Filmkriebel
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- 10133 messages
- 4740 votes
It's always nice to see a film adaptation of a book that the author himself was also enthusiastic about. Vonnegut considered this a masterful adaptation of his book, which was considered unfilmable. It's a non-chronological recounting of traumatic moments in the life of one Billy Pilgrim, a man who, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the bombing of Dresden during the war, which also forms the main part of the film. The deeper layer lies in the post-traumatic experience of all this—not only his war experiences, but also other traumas that have left their mark on him. The strange and more difficult part is the sci-fi section where he suddenly finds himself on another planet with a Hollywood star, which, of course, can't be interpreted literally. The tone is actually quite lighthearted, and the film is quite easy to watch despite the heavier undertones. It's not my genre, but from what I saw, I wasn't disappointed.
Translated from Dutch · View originalLatest News
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