Max Fausnight
Mr. O’Brien
English IV
1 February 2013
As a frequent critic of movies, Slaughterhouse 5(1972) thoroughly impressed me. Often, I watch movies that have a written counterpart and often I prefer the book. In this case, I have found a toss up. The book, written by Kurt Vonnegut, will remain a classic in my mind for some time to come but I truly appreciate what George Roy Hill, the director of the movie, did with the story. Personally, I felt that the way he handled time travel conveyed a better understand to what Billy went through than the book, but I also understand that a book can only help the reader to certain extent. This movie did more justice to the book than any other movie book combination I have seen.
At first while watching, my first dispute with the movie arrived in the very beginning when the Germans capture Paul Lazzaro will Billy and Weary. In the book, Billy and Weary were ditched by not one, but two German scouts, “Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German rifles. The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot,” (381) at first this brought frustration to me because Vonnegut wrote the book in a completely different way. As I continued to watch I discovered Hill had a purpose for this. In the book, Lazzaro introduces his idea of revenge about a man coming and shooting a person on his “list” years down the road once in the balls, and once in the belly (439). In the movie, Lazzaro’s description of revenge and how he gets it is split up into three scenes. The first is when the scout abandons the three soldiers, and throughout the movie he threatens similarly to this, “One day your doorbell’s gonna ring and there’s gonna be this guy in a trench coat.” This threat comes after the American converted Nazi tries to recruit the soldiers into the Nazi regime. I discovered while watching the movie that Lazzaro’s character must be split up in order to fit the pace of the movie. The time travel happens very quickly and in order to smoothly introduce Lazzaro and his personality as a character, the Hill must throw him into the first scene with Billy. I admired Hill’s flexibility and creativity with this specific detail.
With Hill’s creativity in intertwining the past and future with sound he shows the audience one way Billy could be experiencing life. When the crew elects Edgar Derby as their leader the movie shows the scene of Billy elected as the Lions club leader also. Hill implements the sound from the scene of the lions club into the scene of Edgar Derby. Hill does this variously throughout the duration of the film.
As a movie, Slaughterhouse 5, conveys a great representation of the book. Although some sequences of events are different in the movie than the book after looking closely, I have found it might have been intentional for Hill to do that. With the style of Hill moving through time he proved his vast understand of Billy being unstuck in time. Over all, the movie was good.
Nice job Max, you did a great job explaining how you really liked the movie. I only found it boring because I have seen the movie and read the book, so at points you were just rattling off scenes that were common knowledge. To an outside viewer it contains a lot of facts, that might be helpful to someone reading your comment before watching the movie or reading the book.
ReplyDeleteVery insightful to realize the complications regarding Lazzaro's character. It would, in fact, be a challenge for a director to capture Lazzaro in his entirety; however, in splitting up his development, he maintains the flow of action while preserving the character's integrity as written in the book.
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